I work at Google Cambridge, and I'm easily working 50+ hours a week. I work in Technical Infrastructure (on our storage systems in our data centers) and one of my 20% projects was to design and architect the underpinnings of what an Android Product Manager has claimed to be one the most important features of Android N (file based encryption), the open source incarnation of which (ext4 encryption) has turned into a generic file system encryption mechanism that has enabled encryption for f2fs and soon ubifs, and has inspired the btrfs and xfs folks to look at file system based encryption.
For my "official" 80% project, in order to get approval to go into the planning phase for a complex, multi-year project, we had to demonstrate how it would save hundreds of millions of dollars on an ongoing basis, and show how the TCO savings would be many multiples over the software engineering costs to implement said project. So in Technical Infrastructure, we do very much care about operational efficiencies --- that's how Google Compute Engine (which is driven by TI) has been able to cut its prices and inspire the market to follow suit.
And this is not new, by the way --- the whole time (coming up on 7 years) that I've been at Google, we've always been very interested in bringing costs down, and the team was amply rewarded when we rolled out ext4 across the production fleet, because we could accurately quantify the performance benefits, and how that translated to dollars saved to the company.
And so no, I'm not bored. In fact, one of the great things about Google is that I have flexibility to do things that help move the industry, both in Google products and in the Open Source world. This includes serving on program committees, working with a graduate student on a paper which we've submitted to the Usenix FAST conference (fingers crossed, we'll hear soon if it's been accepted), do presentations of my work at LinuxCon, etc. etc. Of course, I probably should be carving out some time to hit the gym, just for personal health reasons....
I just love the dissonance of "I'm easily working 50+ hours a week." and "one of my 20% projects".
When you say it "You'll be working 40 hrs a week and to be successful you'll need to spend an additional 25% of your time coming up with other stuff that helps us." it doesn't sound quite so magical :-)
That said, when I worked there I quickly realized that with no trouble at all I could spend all my waking hours in the office playing with the neat things that are made available to employees. It doesn't feel like overtime when its something you would do in your free time anyway.
The sticky bit is that you don't get profit participation in the financial upside of those extra projects.
Sure, but a lot of these things are things I was doing anyway when I was working for MIT and earning a five figure salary. When I moved out to a startup (VA Linux Systems), I more than doubled my salary; and when I went to Google I took a significant step up in compensation over my previous job at IBM --- and yes, I'm still doing the things that I love to do.
So it's not a matter of doing things because it's needed to be successful (although they won't hurt when I'm next up for Promo, I'm sure), it's the fact that I get to help influence the industry. As far as profit participation is concerned, I'm paid plenty enough to be comfortable, and I'm used to the concept of the financial upside coming indirectly from what my open source activities (e.g., ext4 maintainer, being on the program committee of ATC and FAST conferences, etc.) do for my personal brand. Yes, I'm not going to have the money of say, a Peter Thiel or a Larry Ellison. I also don't have to worry about having all of that money turning me into an *sshole, either. :-)
Am I aware that I'm trading off potentially being able to earn even more income in exchange for more security and the freedom to choose what I do (and the fact that I can find choices that help out the open source projects that I care about _and_ which result in benefits to my company is something I consider a feature, and part of the value I can bring to my employer)? Of course. Sure, I could probably earn more by working for a high frequency trading firm. But I'd lose a lot of freedom. More importantly, what working on moving the poles of the US financial system to the right-half plane would do to my soul isn't worth the extra money it might bring in.
Last year, when I was attending our Storage Infrastructure roadmap/planning meeting, it was very humbling because there lots of people in the room that were way smarter than me. Which is the other really great thing about working at Google; unless you're someone like Jeff Dean, there will be lots of people smarter than you that you can learn from, and the default assumption that you can make is that your colleagues will be very talented.... so I'm not sure how much of an outlier I really am!
Already 5+ years ago, I talked to a director at a recruitment company in London that loved Google, because they were easy pickings to find good candidates to place in the roles he had because they were all - in his words - disillusioned - and at the same time the "Google" on their resumes still made his clients all starry-eyed. He saw recruiting people out of Google as easy money.
One guy says how he works 30 hours in a busy week and uses his 20% time to hit the gym.
But in another's words: "how can I leave when they pay me so much?"