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Comment by verdagon | Hacker News Reader

Even when I was there a couple years ago, 20% time was already basically dead. They had to be approved by those above one's direct managers, needed compelling justification, and getting the go-ahead was pretty rare. This was even for things not in the main products. In other words, 20% projects are the opposite of what they started out as.

I also saw Google shutting down or downsizing a lot of small projects that weren't related to the core business (ads, search, cloud), though that might vary per PA so my read might be off.

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When I worked at Google in 2007, it was a known fact among employees that 20% was not a real thing. It was 120% time even then. You could in theory work on your own thing, but you basically had to do it on your own time.

And I did actually do the 120% time thing for a few months because there was a specific project I really wanted to do, and it would have been nice fit for Google, but my attempts to stir up interest within the company and get any sort of resources were basically dead ends. One of the reasons I eventually left to join a startup.

20% time never made much sense to me as a concept. If the 20% is not part of your performance evaluation, then that would imply everyone is on 80% time. What does that mean and how is it worked into the process? Would you get a 125% score if you did only your normal work instead of a side-project? If you failed to do 20% of your work, do you get a pass?

It seems to me that your work should get graded on some standard, and what % of your time you spent on side-projects should be irrelevant.

In theory the idea was that everybody should want to do a 20% time for the good of the company, and thus failure to seize the 20% opportunity would count against you in the promotion process. In practice though your promotion was really just graded against your main job and nobody cared about 20% time, thus actually doing something in 20% time would be bad because it would hurt your performance for your main job. Even in 2007 everybody would talk about how things were so much better in 2004 and if only you'd seen it then, and so I imagine that maybe back in 2004 you could do 20% time and it would be beneficial for your career, but you'd have to ask somebody who worked there at that time.

As far as I could tell there were a bunch of very talented, very senior engineer who could basically just do whatever they wanted as 100% time, and they did a lot of really great stuff that was helpful to the company as a whole but didn't fit neatly into a specific team. But it didn't seem like that was accessible for mere mortals, nor would you be able to make as large an impact if you were only working on it one day a week.

Yup. And so we get: https://area120.google.com/

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