20% time still exists, you don't even need to tell your manager you are doing it and your manager has limited power to stop you from doing it if he learns about

20% time still exists, you don't even need to tell your manager you are doing it and your manager has limited power to stop you from doing it if he learns about it. If he is trying to stop you then you can escalate. Of course not a lot of people participate in 20% projects since just doing your main job is simpler than trying to balance two jobs. I only used it in short bursts myself, for example testing working on a project with a new team before transferring. However I feel it lives on in spirit, in that your coworkers and manager at Google typically doesn't know what you do from day to day and nobody will scold you or even notice if you work on a different project you feel is important for a week. If they make a fuzz just tell them it was your accumulated 20% time from the past 5 weeks. In short, 20% time means that 80% of the time you belong to your manager and 20% of the time you belong to yourself. You are still judged by 100% of your contributions, so if your the new framework you decided to write didn't turn out to be useful then it wont be of much help for perf. But if it became a huge hit then that 20% project might be more important than your main project.