[agagrgar]

I've been in Azure and GCP. IDK how anyone would get away with it. You constantly have customer issues, people from other teams pinging you, needing help with something. I don't see how it would be possible just to do nothing and survive.

Maybe in some team that is further removed from customers?

[ayewo]

Not to disagree with your experience at Azure and GCP, but the grandparent specifically mentioned their parent entities: Microsoft and Google, each of which have several divisions apart from their respective cloud divisions.

Keep in mind that Azure and GCP are playing catch up to AWS, so they necessarily have to run a tight ship in order to close AWS’ lead.

So its possible for laxity to exist in other divisions in a large company, as long as the money keeps rolling in, e.g. the Windows division at Microsoft (which still enjoys a good share of the desktop market) and the Search division at Google (which still enjoys a good share of the search market).

[agagrgar]

Yeah, I mentioned Azure and GCP specifically, to imply that other divisions within those companies may be different. Anything where you're constantly deploying to enterprise customers, you're going to need to be responsive to issues that come up, and that alone will take a good chunk of the day.

[gipp]

At Google anyway, it's fairly common knowledge that cloud is a far more difficult place to work, both in culture and expectations, than most anywhere else in the company as a SWE.

[agagrgar]

That's surprising because I came from Azure, and Google Cloud is way slower than Azure was. Frankly I think that's why I failed at the job (separate thread). It feels like a "me too" offering, and the initiative and creativity just isn't there, and I just couldn't be bothered to care. I felt so much more energy at Azure (even though they're the ones most often criticized as being "me too").

That said, it may have just been timing or team fit or seratonin levels or whatever. I'm sure plenty of others have had the opposite experience.

[sjtindell]

Aren’t there still tons of developer jobs at Google, Microsoft, Intel, Oracle, etc. where you aren’t on call and just get to write code?

[theskypirate]

It's easy to be productive in that context. People pinging you to get help with something, that's a "positive distraction." You'll write a block of code super fast and send it back to them.