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A comment on Google 20% time volunteers have been rewriting the ITA Matrix flight search app. Parent comment

Re:Google 20% time volunteers have been rewriting the ITA Ma... by onion2k on Friday December 03, 2021 @01:56AM (#29427367)
What other companies never seem to understand about "Google's 20% time" is that, allegedly, as I don't work there, it wasn't really 8 hours out of your contracted 40 hours, but more like 16 hours out of the 80 hours you chose to work this week for most Googlers. People working on things in 20% time are volunteers in the sense that they're doing extra work voluntarily, rather than going home. It's not like they're doing this stuff during "work hours."
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Re:Google 20% time volunteers have been rewriting the ITA Ma... by pram on Friday December 03, 2021 @02:32AM (#29427548)
They had something like this when I worked at Atlassian, which was copied from Google (like most everything there)

You could pick a thing to work on outside your normal job and they’d “give” you time. However you had to basically justify it to your manager. This also hilariously ended up in having to plan OKR style achievements for your spare time project. So it was another, voluntary layer of micromanaging crap added over your real job.

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Re:Google 20% time volunteers have been rewriting the ITA Ma... by mateuszf on Friday December 03, 2021 @03:51AM (#29427980)
> This also hilariously ended up in having to plan OKR style achievements for your spare time project.

Indeed that's really funny in an absurd way.

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Re:Google 20% time volunteers have been rewriting the ITA Ma... by ivalm on Friday December 03, 2021 @02:15AM (#29427462)
No, Googlers I know def don’t work 80 hours…
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Re:Google 20% time volunteers have been rewriting the ITA Ma... by onion2k on Friday December 03, 2021 @02:20AM (#29427486)
I've only heard about it from ex-Googlers so perhaps it's different now. 20% time was introduced a long time ago (before Google went public?) and 80 hour weeks were a lot more common back then...
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Re:Google 20% time volunteers have been rewriting the ITA Ma... by xvector on Friday December 03, 2021 @03:03AM (#29427713)
Some Googlers I know barely work 20 hours!

Anyone have tips for finding a chill team at Google? Passed all interview rounds last time but decided to join another company. Might give it another go if I can get one of those <20hr gigs...

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Re:Google 20% time volunteers have been rewriting the ITA Ma... by zerr on Friday December 03, 2021 @04:30AM (#29428199)
Golang team? I've heard the plan is to slack off next 10 years to add pattern matching in Go 3.
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Re:Google 20% time volunteers have been rewriting the ITA Ma... by zdkl on Friday December 03, 2021 @03:13AM (#29427757)
Step 1: don't post on HN about how you want to minimise your work-time I guess?
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Re:Google 20% time volunteers have been rewriting the ITA Ma... by zerr on Friday December 03, 2021 @04:31AM (#29428211)
The whole HN is dedicated to minimizing work-times actually.
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Re:Google 20% time volunteers have been rewriting the ITA Ma... by xvector on Friday December 03, 2021 @11:26PM (#29438688)
Hey, I do good work even if I work less time! 40hr workweek is kind of pointless anyways.

The last 20hrs have maybe a 20% return, and I work quickly anyways. I also skip BS meetings.

My managers have always respected me despite me working obviously fewer hours. Quality of work + meeting your goals > some meaningless metric.

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Re:Google 20% time volunteers have been rewriting the ITA Ma... by radicalbyte on Friday December 03, 2021 @03:25AM (#29427842)
Bighetti's team is chill :)
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Re:Google 20% time volunteers have been rewriting the ITA Ma... by JaggerJo on Friday December 03, 2021 @04:14AM (#29428117)
can confirm. We built a potato canon last month.
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Re:Google 20% time volunteers have been rewriting the ITA Ma... by hn_go_brrrrr on Friday December 03, 2021 @03:41AM (#29427927)
Not payments.
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Re:Google 20% time volunteers have been rewriting the ITA Ma... by goldenchrome on Friday December 03, 2021 @02:40AM (#29427609)
Haha most Googlers I know work closer to 30 hours a week.
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Re:Google 20% time volunteers have been rewriting the ITA Ma... by xyzzyz on Friday December 03, 2021 @02:59AM (#29427699)
You know some hard working ones then.
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Re:Google 20% time volunteers have been rewriting the ITA Ma... by deadmutex on Friday December 03, 2021 @02:43AM (#29427632)
Two questions: How long have they been in that position? Have they advanced recently?

Genuinely curious.

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Re:Google 20% time volunteers have been rewriting the ITA Ma... by goldenchrome on Friday December 03, 2021 @02:00PM (#29433761)
Once you get to senior you can coast forever and no one will bother you as long as you're meeting expectations, which gets easier and easier once you know the company culture. Anyone with 5+ years of industry experience or 2+ years at Google can figure out how to coast on 30 hours a week if they want. There's 100,000 employees, no one notices. Ads is a seemingly endless firehose of revenue so the bottom line is never threatened by your laziness.
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Re:Google 20% time volunteers have been rewriting the ITA Ma... by skybrian on Friday December 03, 2021 @02:03AM (#29427406)
It’s hard to say for such a large company with people in so many countries, but I doubt all that many Googlers work much more than full time. Many have families.
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Re:Google 20% time volunteers have been rewriting the ITA Ma... by actually_a_dog on Friday December 03, 2021 @01:57AM (#29427374)
Hence the way I've heard it referred to as "120% time."
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