Life Since the Baby Boom

Everyone thinks that Google employees devote 20% of their time to their passions, and isn’t that wonderful? Gmail started out as a 20%; everyone’s heard that.

It’s part of the mythology around Google, and it would be nice if it were true. Once I was at a table with 8 or 9 engineers, and I asked “who here has a 20% project?” One hand went up. Most people never had one, because their regular jobs take up 100% of their time.

The other inhibiting factor, by the way, is that most humans don’t have any passions or hobbies, and that’s almost as true for Google employees as for the general population. However, there were (and are) a lot of non-work activities going on, and those were the best part of being there for me. I’ve written other posts about the Cinema Club that I started, and the authors whose talks I hosted (also this).

and much more. But the one thing no one had done was live theater! It was my ambition for years to finally do that. But how? There were conference rooms, like the one where we showed our movies on Thursday nights, but those are set up for meetings and talks. They don’t have dressing rooms, you can’t easily set up scenery, and most of all, people are using them all day, every day, so any changes you make will probably end up getting destroyed by someone. In the Cinema Club we found that the video and sound systems got messed up nearly every week.

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