FWIW, I regularly grab a couple thousand machines to run some MapReduce over all of Google's copy of the web. This is not a one-off occurrence, it is (for me, someone whose "official" job duties usually focus on UI) a roughly once-a-month occurrence. It can be as much as several times a day for people whose daily job is crunching data.
I also work on a team where I am the only one without an advanced degree, and all but two of the others' have Ph.Ds. Two of my teammates graduated college at 20. Many of them have published.
And I get to push cool things out to the results page with fairly little bureaucracy. Sometimes I even get to do it in response to HN users' comments:
The thing is, if I'd just said "I get to do this, and I get to do that", this comment would've read "Yes, but I doubt you're a typical Googler. I doubt that everyone at Google is always running interesting-sounding side projects." Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
(Truth be told, not everyone at Google is running interesting-sounding side projects. The point is that everyone at Google has the ability to run interesting-sounding side projects. Whether you make the time to do it is up to you.)
I also work on a team where I am the only one without an advanced degree, and all but two of the others' have Ph.Ds. Two of my teammates graduated college at 20. Many of them have published.
And I get to push cool things out to the results page with fairly little bureaucracy. Sometimes I even get to do it in response to HN users' comments:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3364339
The thing is, if I'd just said "I get to do this, and I get to do that", this comment would've read "Yes, but I doubt you're a typical Googler. I doubt that everyone at Google is always running interesting-sounding side projects." Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
(Truth be told, not everyone at Google is running interesting-sounding side projects. The point is that everyone at Google has the ability to run interesting-sounding side projects. Whether you make the time to do it is up to you.)