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

I am a Googler. I will only speak to my personal experience, and the experience of people around me: 20% time still exists, and is encouraged as a mechanism to explore exciting new ideas without the complexity and cost of a real product.

My last three years were spent turning my 20% project into a product, and my job now is spent turning another 20% project into a product. There was never any management pressure from any of my managers to not work on 20% projects; my performance reviews were consistent with a productive Googler.

Calling 20% time 120% time is fair. Realistically it's hard to do your day job productively and also build a new project from scratch. You have to be willing to put in hours outside of your normal job to be successful.

What 20% time really means is that you- as a Google eng- have access to, and can use, Google's compute infrastructure to experiment and build new systems. The infrastructure, and the associated software tools, can be leveraged in 20% time to make an eng far more productive than they normally would be. Certainly I, and many other Googlers, are simply super-motivated and willing to use our free time to work on projects that use our infrstructure because we're intrinsically interested in using these things to make new products.

I'm afraid I'm having a hard time understanding how calling 20% time dead vs insisting that it became 120% time are two different things.

I feel that the reason 20% time captured the attention of those wishing to become future Google employees is because it implies that you are literally granted the ability to take 20% of your work schedule and spend it on side-projects. Put another way, Google is granting you permission to pursue what interests you on their time.

What I appear to be hearing is that work obligations require 100% of one's work schedule as opposed to 80%, and that a 20% project is typically pursued with time that would otherwise be considered personal time.

If one were to use 20% of their work schedule to build something, and then invest some of their personal time into it, then I would say that 20% time is alive and well. If Google merely grants you access to resources, not time, then I would argue that 20% time is dead. It would be more appropriate to rename the perk.

Sorry if I'm coming off as confrontational, I'm genuinely interested in getting a clearer view of the situation.