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Comment by hueving | Hacker News Reader

>Engineers are permitted to spend up to 20% of their time working on any project of their choice, without needing approval from their manager or anyone else.

From what I understand talking to current employees, this is now bullshit. You could spend 20% on other stuff, but the culture in many of the groups is such that you are putting your peer review at risk by doing so because of your reduced output.

Any current Googlers that spend 1 day of every week working on something completely unrelated to their main job want to comment?

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This (like a lot of things at Google) varies wildly across PA and even among managers within a PA. All my managers so far have been extremely supportive of 20% time, and I've personally worked on three different 20% projects over my last four years (including two which have been open-sourced). That being said my engagement model has generally been less "one solid day a week" and more "a few days in a row once a month or two" in quieter times for my 80% gig, or "an hour or two every day" in busier ones.

My understanding is that while I'm a little bit of an outlier, in general 20% time at Google is nowhere near as dead as people on the internet tend to claim (at least for engineers).

What is a PA ?

Product Area (so Ads, Cloud, Search, etc).

I spend 10-20% of my time at Google (depending on the needs) developing and maintaining an internal tool that is used by 100-1000 engineers across 10-100 teams (not including my current team). Not only have my last 3 managers been extremely supportive of this, I've netted a few peer bonuses from this, and some nice feedback from senior people that appreciated my work.

The "approval from my manager" amounted to telling them in our weekly 1:1 meeting that I wanted to spend my 20% time on that project.

Of course, if you spend 20% of your time working alone on something that produces 0 results in the span of several quarters, I suspect your experience is not going to be the same.

You've made yourself an integral part of the company and gotten your name out there to boot.

Back when I worked at Compaq there was a tool everyone used in the build process and it had a splash screen that mentioned the author. That guy was a legend at Compaq because everyone had at least heard of him. When my buddy took over the build process he ended up emulating Mr. Legend and put his name on his tool that was used thousands of times a day. Same thing happened to him: oh you're the Mr. Coder? He had his pick of projects for a very long time.

Even when 20% was in existence, it was (mockingly) called 120%. I will leave you to guess as to why.

I'm not currently, but I was doing that for the last couple years with no ill consequences. I'm only not doing that now because I don't have a 20% idea that's particularly exciting to me.

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