By the time I got to Google in 2012, 20% seemed dead to me. If it had any meaning, it just meant "you can do some extra work on something management approves",

By the time I got to Google in 2012, 20% seemed dead to me. If it had any meaning, it just meant "you can do some extra work on something management approves", not "I have a wild idea and want to go off and try it in my 20%" (as I naively understood it before coming there.) It was already the case, at that point, that 20% really just meant doing more of what Google was already doing. But maybe I just didn't know the right people or have the right connections or status.