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‘20% projects’

Posted on April 4, 2006 by Tim Huckle
Filed Under Ramblings |

Google has made ‘20 percent time’ fashionable it seems. 

For those that haven’t been sucked in to thinking what it must be like to work at Google HQ, this is the time that ’Googlers’ (employees to you and me) have to develop their own projects. These inevitably turn in to world class products: Gmail and Google Finance for example are both reported to have originated from the ‘20% project’ route.

The fact that I’ve heard the phrase ‘20% time’ in two external meetings, dropped by consultants who seem to believe they’ve been shown the light and discovered some new way of working is rather concerning and further demonstrates how ‘Google’ strategy dominates business minds. Dangerously so if you ask me. 

Surely every developer needs time to work on their ‘own stuff’ ? This is nothing new.  If a developer was to only ever work on projects defined by other people then they’d be very miserable individuals indeed and half the decent software out in the world wouldn’t exist.  Sure, most of the bad software probably exists because developers thinking in their own unique way didn’t involve ‘normal’ potential users; but I’ll cover that another time…

I can exclusively confirm, our 20% time is slightly more unique though.  10% of it is conducted over a beer after work; and the other 10% is usually done in the evening’s when we’re sober. I can’t help thinking something’s not quite right ;)

Here are some things our spare time is occupied with currently:-

User Plot

Category: Ramblings

Comments

One Response to “‘20% projects’”

  1. Sushil on April 6th, 2006 8:08 am

    Yes i agree with your thoughts and benefits the employer..

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