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Comment by Slansitartop | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

The refrain I hear is that you can do 20% projects, but you have to do it on top of your 100% project, which isn't contradicted by what you say.

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.

But do managers adjust their expectations of your main project to 0.8 of expected output?

Sure if you can get everything expected of you done in 32 hours, you can spend the remaining 8 on something else.

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:

https://www.hrzone.com/lead/culture/why-did-google-abandon-2...:

> Why did Google abandon 20% time for innovation?

> 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.

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