What other companies never seem to understand about "Google's 20% time" is that, allegedly, as I don't work there, it wasn't really 8 hours out of your contracted 40 hours, but more like 16 hours out of the 80 hours you chose to work this week for most Googlers. People working on things in 20% time are volunteers in the sense that they're doing extra work voluntarily, rather than going home. It's not like they're doing this stuff during "work hours."
They had something like this when I worked at Atlassian, which was copied from Google (like most everything there)
You could pick a thing to work on outside your normal job and they’d “give” you time. However you had to basically justify it to your manager. This also hilariously ended up in having to plan OKR style achievements for your spare time project. So it was another, voluntary layer of micromanaging crap added over your real job.
I've only heard about it from ex-Googlers so perhaps it's different now. 20% time was introduced a long time ago (before Google went public?) and 80 hour weeks were a lot more common back then...
Anyone have tips for finding a chill team at Google? Passed all interview rounds last time but decided to join another company. Might give it another go if I can get one of those <20hr gigs...
Once you get to senior you can coast forever and no one will bother you as long as you're meeting expectations, which gets easier and easier once you know the company culture. Anyone with 5+ years of industry experience or 2+ years at Google can figure out how to coast on 30 hours a week if they want. There's 100,000 employees, no one notices. Ads is a seemingly endless firehose of revenue so the bottom line is never threatened by your laziness.
It’s hard to say for such a large company with people in so many countries, but I doubt all that many Googlers work much more than full time. Many have families.
