It depends on your manager. Despite Google's claims of being post-managerial and peer-driven, the truth is that your manager has free rein to ass-rape you if he perceives you as being distracted by your 20% project. That's because your actual progress requires both good peer reviews and good "calibration scores"-- which are quarterly, manager-assigned, and secret. (Managers aren't supposed to tell employees their scores aside from a 0.5-point interval on a scale where that's a huge range, and people have gotten in hot water for asking or trying to bargain.)
Since you have to pass two (sometimes) conflicting tests, you get the worst of both systems. You get old-school managerial abuse and the careerist jockeying for visibility that occurs when large companies attempt to be "peer-driven". Instead of offering two paths to success, Google offers two orthogonal roadblocks, both of which must be overcome.
20% time is alive and well if you have a supportive (i.e. good) manager. If you have a typical manager, you can probably get away with 20%T as long as it's not obvious. If you have an evil manager, then watch the fuck out. There's a 5% cutoff for PIPs (the bureaucratic humiliation derived from the principle that it's better to keep a fired employee around for 2 months pissing all over morale than to cut a severance check) and having a 20%T project is an easy way to end up on the hitlist.
The danger of 20% time at a place like Google is that (a) the best work is awesome, but most of the work isn't very interesting, so (b) pretty much everyone is trying to get on a better project (and starts campaigning from about the 7th week) and (c) managers know this and don't like people who make it obvious. 20-percenters are either trying to transfer (that's the best use of 20%T) or to start something up within Google (which expresses the same flight risk, but is far less likely to work). So if a manager has to throw someone under the bus because a team is underperforming and doesn't have enough "calibration" points, 20-percenters (flight risks) are the first ones to go.
On Pref, from http://piaw.blogspot.com/2010/05/promotion-systems-redux.htm... :
“In any case, I think it’s very healthy for Google to have an internal discussion about this. But do I expect the system to change? No. The super-star rule I referred to in that previous post would prevent that. I did have a discussion with a VP about this. He told me that when he first joined Google, he tried to change the promotion criteria to better formally recognize leadership, mentoring, and the importance of spreading knowledge (technical or otherwise) throughout the organization. The result? A bunch of very senior engineers (who had all benefited under the current regime, and were understandably worried about their career prospects under a different system) shouted him down.”
How would you suggest solving this problem?
I'm agnostic on whether Page is really responsible in any way for Google's decline. I joined after he stepped in. I don't know anything about Page, but he seems to be a bad judge of character because of some of the things he has allowed and some policies he's supported.
What happened post-Schmidt wasn't directly Page's fault, so much as a lot of the other executives were waiting in the wings with shitty ideas that they now saw a chance to push through. Execs will attempt that any time there's a guard change, and I can't say that Page did a worse job of handling it than I would have done.
I asked a successful business owner what the hardest thing was about being CEO and he said (paraphrased) that "The job is easy, in that you have the power to have work done, but the hard part is that everyone is fucking lying to you." I don't think Page is a good judge of when people are lying to him.
I don't think any of Google's triumvirate (Page, Brin, Schmidt) are bad men. I think they're very good men who built an admirable company and kept it intact for a long time. I think they lack something in the ability to judge character (mea culpa: so do I; I tend to be too trusting of individuals despite my intellectual cynicism) which is why a lot of the middle managers and executives are problematic.
Then again, 90% of the cultural rot occurred before Page. Google's hideous "calibration score" system wasn't built in a day.
Since you have to pass two (sometimes) conflicting tests, you get the worst of both systems. You get old-school managerial abuse and the careerist jockeying for visibility that occurs when large companies attempt to be "peer-driven". Instead of offering two paths to success, Google offers two orthogonal roadblocks, both of which must be overcome.
20% time is alive and well if you have a supportive (i.e. good) manager. If you have a typical manager, you can probably get away with 20%T as long as it's not obvious. If you have an evil manager, then watch the fuck out. There's a 5% cutoff for PIPs (the bureaucratic humiliation derived from the principle that it's better to keep a fired employee around for 2 months pissing all over morale than to cut a severance check) and having a 20%T project is an easy way to end up on the hitlist.
The danger of 20% time at a place like Google is that (a) the best work is awesome, but most of the work isn't very interesting, so (b) pretty much everyone is trying to get on a better project (and starts campaigning from about the 7th week) and (c) managers know this and don't like people who make it obvious. 20-percenters are either trying to transfer (that's the best use of 20%T) or to start something up within Google (which expresses the same flight risk, but is far less likely to work). So if a manager has to throw someone under the bus because a team is underperforming and doesn't have enough "calibration" points, 20-percenters (flight risks) are the first ones to go.