My experience while working there was that like most things the experience varied hugely depending on your manager and your current rating. For me, it was also

My experience while working there was that like most things the experience varied hugely depending on your manager and your current rating. For me, it was also kind of irrelevant since I'm one of those "weird" people that write code to relax in my "spare" time. Google didn't care what time of day you worked, I would find myself during the weekend trying out different things with map/reduce to see how different algorithms would need to be adapted and what not. Was that 20% time or just using the company's assets to indulge my curiosity? A bit of both I guess. As a manager I'm pretty cognizant of the risk of burnout, and one cause of burnout is being hammered by a problem day in and day out. To avoid that I always coached my team members to have "three" jobs, one was their main job, one was their time to work on things that were important but not urgent, and the third was to indulge their curiosity and learn something new or further their understanding of something. But I also respected people who wanted to just "do their job" and go home, so for them we'd keep it simple about what was expected and how it was measured.