Do people in Google still think the magic is there? It seems like a great place if you want stability and a nice salary, but obviously (unless you're in the comparatively tiny X dept) you're going to be a very small cog in a huge machine?
One guy says how he works 30 hours in a busy week and uses his 20% time to hit the gym.
But in another's words: "how can I leave when they pay me so much?"
For my "official" 80% project, in order to get approval to go into the planning phase for a complex, multi-year project, we had to demonstrate how it would save hundreds of millions of dollars on an ongoing basis, and show how the TCO savings would be many multiples over the software engineering costs to implement said project. So in Technical Infrastructure, we do very much care about operational efficiencies --- that's how Google Compute Engine (which is driven by TI) has been able to cut its prices and inspire the market to follow suit.
And this is not new, by the way --- the whole time (coming up on 7 years) that I've been at Google, we've always been very interested in bringing costs down, and the team was amply rewarded when we rolled out ext4 across the production fleet, because we could accurately quantify the performance benefits, and how that translated to dollars saved to the company.
And so no, I'm not bored. In fact, one of the great things about Google is that I have flexibility to do things that help move the industry, both in Google products and in the Open Source world. This includes serving on program committees, working with a graduate student on a paper which we've submitted to the Usenix FAST conference (fingers crossed, we'll hear soon if it's been accepted), do presentations of my work at LinuxCon, etc. etc. Of course, I probably should be carving out some time to hit the gym, just for personal health reasons....
In other words, very much an outlier, even at Google! :)
When you say it "You'll be working 40 hrs a week and to be successful you'll need to spend an additional 25% of your time coming up with other stuff that helps us." it doesn't sound quite so magical :-)
That said, when I worked there I quickly realized that with no trouble at all I could spend all my waking hours in the office playing with the neat things that are made available to employees. It doesn't feel like overtime when its something you would do in your free time anyway.
The sticky bit is that you don't get profit participation in the financial upside of those extra projects.
So it's not a matter of doing things because it's needed to be successful (although they won't hurt when I'm next up for Promo, I'm sure), it's the fact that I get to help influence the industry. As far as profit participation is concerned, I'm paid plenty enough to be comfortable, and I'm used to the concept of the financial upside coming indirectly from what my open source activities (e.g., ext4 maintainer, being on the program committee of ATC and FAST conferences, etc.) do for my personal brand. Yes, I'm not going to have the money of say, a Peter Thiel or a Larry Ellison. I also don't have to worry about having all of that money turning me into an *sshole, either. :-)
Am I aware that I'm trading off potentially being able to earn even more income in exchange for more security and the freedom to choose what I do (and the fact that I can find choices that help out the open source projects that I care about _and_ which result in benefits to my company is something I consider a feature, and part of the value I can bring to my employer)? Of course. Sure, I could probably earn more by working for a high frequency trading firm. But I'd lose a lot of freedom. More importantly, what working on moving the poles of the US financial system to the right-half plane would do to my soul isn't worth the extra money it might bring in.