She was lying to Yahoo employees to make them shut up. There's no nice way to put that. My opinion of Mayer just halved reading that, I had no idea she had been misleading Yahoo staff. What a pity.
I worked at Google for quite a long time and had multiple 20% projects. One of them went into production and now has (I'm told) a team of more than 20 people working on it full time, so the idea they can't go live to users or become real products is totally wrong.
A few things were consistently true when I was there even in 2006:
• Some people would claim 20% time didn't exist or was theoretical
• Other people would be simultaneously taking it and launching new products based on it
News started as a 20% thing. So did GMail, if I recall correctly. Google Sets, if you remember that. There were many, I'm just picking whatever examples spring to mind quickly.
Now, can I believe that at times teams were put under pressure and some managers asked people not to take it? Yeah, absolutely. I spent my time at Google on teams that were doing maintenance and operational time work, first as an SRE and later on a did a tour on the front line fighting spam and hijacking. Those are the sorts of things where there are no product driven "crunch times" (except when there's an attack). So the culture there is maybe more conducive to side projects.
But the idea that it never existed at all is just a lie, sorry. It existed for me across multiple parts of the company and a span of nearly 8 years.
We should ignore the word of one of the company's earliest employees, who worked there for over a decade and became a VP just because she no longer works there?
Yes, because context is key. In that statement she was attempting to craft Yahoo!'s work culture as it's CEO.
In contrast, I've been at Google since 2006 and have been utilizing 20% time since I started, and other Googlers here echo the same experience, and many of our projects are publicly available.
Not sure how her statement jives with the experience and artifacts of other's work other than to say it's not correct, and shaped by the context of the statement.
Google employs over 100K people. With that many people there are statistically going to be people with the most amazing and dreadful experiences of working at the place - none of them representative.
Well. They are representative of a wide variety of different work cultures within Google. And if one were to join it would depend on the team/manager one ends up with what part of the stories told would be representative to you.
As always in big corporations there is no one culture, but an amalgamation of many different subcultures. They can have a shared core, but even that becomes more unlikely the more a company grows. At least in my experience.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/mayer-google-20-time-does-no...