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A comment on Ask HN: Was 20% time a good policy for Google's working culture?.

Re:Ask HN: Was 20% time a good policy for Google's working c... by dub on Sunday December 13, 2020 @03:08PM (#25409725)
In the heyday of 20% time, Google had more money than they knew what to do with and the engineers were generally overqualified. Remember that in the early 2000s Google was famous for hiring people with PhDs and asking them build web servers.

Within that climate, 20% time was a great policy. Nobody needed "permission" to take a day out of the week to write a better source code management workflow or a config file VIM code completion for the internal codebase or improve build times or fix an annoying bug in another team's codebase, or even just generate good will for the company by contributing to open source projects. It was good for the company, and good for morale.

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Re:Ask HN: Was 20% time a good policy for Google's working c... by yodon on Sunday December 13, 2020 @03:37PM (#25409991)
The way I've heard it expressed is "if you want to hire racehorses, sometimes you've just got to let them run"
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Re:Ask HN: Was 20% time a good policy for Google's working c... by Privacy846 on Sunday December 13, 2020 @03:39PM (#25410017)
I don’t understand. A PhD is a degree in research. If you have a PhD and are building web servers you sound misqualified.
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Re:Ask HN: Was 20% time a good policy for Google's working c... by topkai22 on Sunday December 13, 2020 @04:34PM (#25410520)
That’s exactly the point- Google in that time frame did a TON of prestige hiring, whether or not it made sense for the actual work they needed to fill.
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Re:Ask HN: Was 20% time a good policy for Google's working c... by Privacy846 on Sunday December 13, 2020 @04:46PM (#25410640)
That’s not what I got from the original comment.
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Re:Ask HN: Was 20% time a good policy for Google's working c... by cambalache on Sunday December 13, 2020 @05:48PM (#25411205)
How so? That was entirely the point
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Re:Ask HN: Was 20% time a good policy for Google's working c... by Privacy846 on Monday December 14, 2020 @12:59PM (#25420791)
You’re not the origianl commenter so I don’t know how you divined that.
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Re:Ask HN: Was 20% time a good policy for Google's working c... by dub on Monday December 14, 2020 @04:16PM (#25423432)
Building google _was_ research. It grew out of a PhD thesis. There are publicly available papers describing lots of the infrastructure innovations along the way (GFS, bigtable, mapreduce, borg, spanner, etc)
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Re:Ask HN: Was 20% time a good policy for Google's working c... by Privacy846 on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @03:21PM (#25434706)
Take it up with the grandparent comment!!! I replied to the part about hiring PhDs to build web servers, with the strong implications that they were overqualified (or—misqualified) for the task!!!
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Re:Ask HN: Was 20% time a good policy for Google's working c... by dilyevsky on Sunday December 13, 2020 @10:15PM (#25413133)
Because it was never a thing
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