At Microsoft at least that wasn't my experience at all. I knew several people there who hadn't done any real productive work for the last 7-10 years, probably longer.

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?

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).

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Love the async-ian slip

As someone who put more lines of code into <50KLOC hobby project, that is not guaranteed, especially when your "little work" affects the bottom line on megabucks scale.

hypothetically, do you think if people weren't allowed to drink caffeine or use performance enhancing drugs (adderall etc..), what % would not make that threshold of performance?

No idea; most people I worked with drank coffee but never once was I exposed to performance enhancing drugs. At Microsoft I worked on IronPython and the people I worked with were productive not in the sense that they churned out 1000s and 1000s of lines of code a day, but they were productive in the sense that they were constantly outputting fairly novel solutions.

A similar thing was true at Google, I worked in the platforms division there (storage systems, BigTable, Linux kernel tweaking), and it was mostly about identifying bottlenecks and coming up with interesting solutions to squeeze out more performance. Most of this work wasn't like massive lines of code, but you had to really understand the problem at a deep level and have the kind of rigor and discipline to make changes to large systems without breaking anything in the process. That last bit was very hard to do, since coming up with optimizations that don't break anything is surprisingly difficult.

I’ve never mentioned my ADHD diagnosis and medication to my coworkers and none have ever mentioned it to me.