I really don't get what you're saying here. You get paid for 100% of your time, you just get to work on something beyond your direct responsibilities that still benefits Google for 20% of it.
If you're alluding to "120% time", fair enough, but that's not what GP was referring to.
> If you're alluding to "120% time", fair enough, but that's not what GP was referring to.
From other comments, it's obvious that 1) Google expects you to do your 100%, and then a 20% on top of that of "Google related projects", most likely owned by Google, for free.
I've never ever heard of that actually becoming a requirement.
What happens is that some managers really don't buy into the 20% concept, and don't provide time for it. Employees in those teams determined to do it anyway end up doing 120%.
There is absolutely no requirement at Google to put in time on a 20% project.
That said, what happens in practice is that 20% projects are the way that Google engineers are able to move across teams: You pick a team you want to join. You do something for that team as your 20% project with the goal of getting that manager to request your transfer to their team.
So if you're desperate to get off your team without quitting Google, you could get backed into committing 120%.
Former Google employee and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer once stated “I’ve got to tell you the dirty little secret of Google's 20% time. It's really 120% time.”[6]
Yahoo CEO and formal Googler Marissa Mayer once bluntly denied its true existence.
“It’s funny, people have been asking me since I got here, ‘When is Yahoo going to have 20% time?'” she said on stage during an all-employee meeting at Yahoo. “I’ve got to tell you the dirty little secret of Google’s 20% time. It’s really 120% time.”
The 20% Project is an initiative where company employees are allocated twenty-percent of their paid work time to pursue personal projects. The objective of the program is to inspire innovation in participating employees and ultimately increase company potential. The 20% Project was influenced by a comparable program, launched in 1948, by manufacturing multinational 3M which required employees to dedicate fifteen-percent of their paid hours to a personal interest.[1]
Nothing say anything about company related projects, it only mentions personal projects. If you're talking about company projects, then it's not a 20% project. Even less so if you are talking about doing 100% of your company work beside.
I've got a feeling SV companies have hijacked the term 1) for PR bs, and 2) to get more work from employees.
It looks to me like the Wikipedia text is misleading, because I agree with your interpretation of the text.
Somebody should update Wikipedia...
I think that originates with Google's PR, because I remember the PR when the 20% initiative was introduced was misleading at the time too. To outsiders, I remember (~20 years ago) the PR gave the impression you could work on anything of personal interest, such as running or contributing to open source projects, your own programming language or editor or whatever for 20% of the week if you joined Google. Google would own what you did there so they would benefit (much like the 3M post-it notes thing), but other than that it was like paid personal-development and mind-refreshment time. But it's not like that and probably never was.
It's not intended to just be using 20% of your work time to work on whatever the heck you want to.