It's hard to take this post seriously when basic facts are off.
> To support this company strategy, Google makes it really, really easy for anyone to start up a new project. The culture of “20% time” gives people permission to work on ideas outside of their primary role. There’s only the lightest of reviews needed to launch a “1% experiment.”
No, it is not super easy to start a new project. I'm in Google Cloud and we're pretty focused on executing team priorities. I can suggest new work-streams and write arguments in their favor, sure. But I can't just randomly add a feature or go away to work on a new product for a while. Every public thing in Cloud, at least, is carefully reviewed with a large checklist covering privacy, security, accessibility, API style, integration with existing systems like metrics, legal, etc. The simplest cloud service can take an extra six months or a year to get past these blocks. These requirements also apply to features. What we get for this is quality and consistency between products/features.
And 20% time isn't really a thing any more. You can get permission from your manager to work on something else, perhaps. But more likely this sort of thing is more like 120%. It's not at all as lackadaisical as it's presented to be. The most I see around my team is people volunteering for large-scale clean-ups. But these are more slack-time projects like 5% projects. It's not totally gone however. I think the person who made Google Maps zoom out to a globe did it as 20% project, and I believe adding CitiBike support was similar as well.
We are also super careful about experiments. Every Google Search experiment has to go through a senior management review. In my team, every flag rollout is discussed and approved before rollout.
Insofar as these tidbits are presented as evidence for loose leadership, they don't make sense. The ship is fairly tight, at least in Cloud.
> To support this company strategy, Google makes it really, really easy for anyone to start up a new project. The culture of “20% time” gives people permission to work on ideas outside of their primary role. There’s only the lightest of reviews needed to launch a “1% experiment.”
No, it is not super easy to start a new project. I'm in Google Cloud and we're pretty focused on executing team priorities. I can suggest new work-streams and write arguments in their favor, sure. But I can't just randomly add a feature or go away to work on a new product for a while. Every public thing in Cloud, at least, is carefully reviewed with a large checklist covering privacy, security, accessibility, API style, integration with existing systems like metrics, legal, etc. The simplest cloud service can take an extra six months or a year to get past these blocks. These requirements also apply to features. What we get for this is quality and consistency between products/features.
And 20% time isn't really a thing any more. You can get permission from your manager to work on something else, perhaps. But more likely this sort of thing is more like 120%. It's not at all as lackadaisical as it's presented to be. The most I see around my team is people volunteering for large-scale clean-ups. But these are more slack-time projects like 5% projects. It's not totally gone however. I think the person who made Google Maps zoom out to a globe did it as 20% project, and I believe adding CitiBike support was similar as well.
We are also super careful about experiments. Every Google Search experiment has to go through a senior management review. In my team, every flag rollout is discussed and approved before rollout.
Insofar as these tidbits are presented as evidence for loose leadership, they don't make sense. The ship is fairly tight, at least in Cloud.