Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead

"Why pay engineers to work on projects that will never meet a business case?"

You need your engineers to put up with mundane, boring work. Paying them to spend a minority of their time on an interesting project helps.

The 20% thing isn't really much of a perk anyway. I would only ever work for a company that let me work whenever I wanted, take naps whenever I wanted, go for walks whenever I wanted, and work on other projects. I do this at my current job, and I still end up being more productive in my actual work than any other developer I've ever met (and more productive than the average google engineer, I'd venture to say). I run the company, so I guess I can decide how I work :)

See also the "people simply empty out" article posted on HN. Google seems to be falling for the PHB fallacy that people are just machines that crank out code. Perhaps that is what google is becoming, but I certainly wouldn't want to work there.