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.

Did you get any better at chess?

I think OP was saying they're not Harvard, and thus not coasting based off those connections alone.

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.

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?

I'm literally about to get fired from Google for this, possibly today (HR is calling wondering where I am). Dumb thing is, I've been working like crazy on my 20% project. I just can't stand the other one, got an NI on my first (and presumably last) review cycle so pretty much killed any chance of a transfer.

I've never outright lied, though certainly hemmed and hawed. And occasionally blatantly "I haven't done anything this week". And yeah, certainly work-from-home makes it easier to shut down and ignore everything. Which is great, except you feel like crap afterwards.

But like I said, it depends on the project. Next job I take, money is going to be less of a consideration. Just want to work on something interesting. And there's a reasonable likelihood that I fall into the category of "needs professional help" (I also flunked out of school twice and took six years to graduate, despite getting five 5's on AP tests and only needing two years' worth of credits), but I've tried a few times without much success.

And, no I don't think it's super-common. At least not to this level. Most of my coworkers seem to genuinely work pretty hard. Though some don't.