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Former Google employee Hans Cardinal shared his view on 20 percent time and the working environment he experienced inside Google.

Google recruiters are out of touch. This 20% project concept is a thing of the past yet they still promote it as if it exists. Recent survey (Googlegeist) shows that most people don't even have a 5% project since they're working overtime on their primary project. Nothing really innovative has come from within in the past few years. Most of the stuff is just maintenance.

He continues:

There's a 70/20/10 initiative, meaning 70% of the resources are spent on ads. Not surprisingly most of the new hires work on ads. Maintenance. Bug fixes. Fun. Most of the Adwords and Adsense managers are young kids who have had little work and management experience and the code base is absolutely hideous. In fact most of the engineers from Google ads are some of the worst engineers I've ever worked with. The only reason why they're keeping their job is because Google needs them to be around. I don't even want to get into ad PMs. They are very territorial and very unpleasant to work with.

Thank God I vested and left before the implosion.

(Photo by AP/Paul Sakuma)