People work hard in cloud but there are no MBAs in sight. It’s all very technical work, often very bottom up driven.

A lot of the overall goals of cloud are more ambitious than AWS offerings. Reliability is prized more than it is in other areas of Google as well, because customers are so technical and often notice.

Not a place to coast, but I’d say most people do a solid 45 a week for those that want to get good reviews and get a fat bonus.

Some teams in Cloud suck but the core engineering teams have some top talent and solve some very hard problems. Keep in mind Borg and Spanner are both “cloud”, but so are many field sales teams with an average tenure <2y

Not at all, it's a breath of fresh air. It's much less of a check buganizer, check email, write code, push CL cycle. Work is very project focused with high flexibility, my current team isn't even pushing to g3 and using different build systems entirely just because we wanted some more flexibility for example, and it doesn't matter as long as we are getting results.

The problems are a lot more technical though and I don't see a lot of L3s being able to work in the environment as it requires a lot more intuition and experience.

I usually work 45hours a week, but I don't mind it. Plus I'm 100% WFH here cause my management isn't dealing with in office bs.