News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Operation Rosehub – patching thousands of open-source projects. Parent comment

Re:Operation Rosehub – patching thousands of open-source pro... by nostrademons on Wednesday March 01, 2017 @08:56PM (#13770732)
20% time has always meant different things depending on who you talk to. It's likely that you're just talking to different people.

I took copious amounts of 20% time in my time at Google (2009-2014). Usually I'd start a 20% project with neither my manager's knowledge nor his approval; if it looked like it had legs, I'd let him know about it and ask what he thought. I never had a manager outright forbid me from working on a 20% project; responses ranged from "You should consider this your main project now; it's critically important that we understand this area" (along with a spot bonus for delivering on it) to "Well, you can work on it, but you are unlikely to get credit for it come promo time." In general, as long as I got my work done, my managers didn't care what else I was working on.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Operation Rosehub – patching thousands of open-source pro... by ensignavenger on Thursday March 02, 2017 @01:23PM (#13776681)
Was your workload such that you could put in a reasonable number of hours on your 'work' and still have 20% of your time for other projects? Or was 20% time just putting in an extra 20% on top of what other developers (who didn't do 20% projects) would do?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Operation Rosehub – patching thousands of open-source pro... by nostrademons on Thursday March 02, 2017 @04:14PM (#13778282)
Over my career there, yes, I could put a reasonable number of hours on my work and still do 20% projects. There were short periods of time when I was asked to "bank" the time and focus entirely on my main project, eg. I might work straight for 5 weeks on my main project and then take a week straight of 20% time once it launched.

This suited me fine - usually the way I took 20% time was to fit it into time periods when I didn't really have much else to do or I was bored with my main project. And splitting it up like this let me focus more intently on both of them, which helped in delivering.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Operation Rosehub – patching thousands of open-source pro... by ensignavenger on Thursday March 02, 2017 @05:21PM (#13778814)
Cool, sounds like it worked out for you about the way I would expect. I suppose it may depend some on your team, I have heard some people say it is just 20% extra work.
[ Parent | on HN ]