Honestly, I'm not so surprised. A lot of stuff about employment Google reads like hagiographies. Maybe it was that way in the distant past, but its most notable perks (20% time, etc.) have been cut and it's big and publicly traded now, so rot has definitely had time to set in.
20% projects have been cut? I wish someone told me that before I started a 20% project which spanned multiple quarters, and still did well in my last performance review.
If an engineer isn't doing well on their 80% project, a 20% project might be frowned upon, that is true.
I guess the policy has changed. My impression was in the early days you could work 20% on your own stuff (no/few approvals necessary) and 80% on your corporate assignments. That's changed into something that, frankly, isn't very unique:
> In 2012 the firm began requiring engineers who wished to work on individual projects to run their proposals by their managers first. This was a significant change from the firm’s previous policy.
> In 2013 it was reported that managers had clamped down on staff taking ’20% time’ so as to avoid their teams falling behind in Google’s internal productivity rankings. Managers are judged on the productivity of their teams—Google has a highly developed internal analytics team that constantly measures all employees’ productivity—and so time spent on ’20% time’ projects would impact this.
2013 Google sounds like pretty much every other major company, in this area.
I think you can still do a 20% project. This was about the performance systems, and not about workload. Workload is easy peasy. Its almost a sinecure for most people because all you need to do is to optimize for promo.
So that refrain seems to imply the 20% project must be done as additional work after spending 40 hours a week on the 100% project. My point was you actually can spend roughly 32 hours a week on your main project, if you are performing well, and then roughly 8 hours a week on your 20% project, and still get high performance ratings.
