throwawayamz27

The subtlety is that its not about projects not being delivered on time, its about them never being delivered (either cancelled or scoped down until no one has to actually do anything).

In an environment like this the incentive is to become a bottleneck for a lot of projects (so you get at least some that get delivered) and then a) do nothing on most to outwait the inevitable cancellation b) do the minimum possible work on the remainder, but make it seem as complex as possible.

Even with low hours of work this becomes a very stressful environment as if you are trying to get something done, you have to be constantly convincing people you are depending on that the project is worthy of category b). While doing the exact thing to the people depending on you. Turnover makes this hard also as a small percentage of coworkers are very valuable to you (you can trust them to prioritize your project).

From my experience this stress stretches into your out of work time, making the WLB worse even with a reasonable amount of "in office" hours.

The apple developer program license lets Apple use this trademark anyway, they can advertise any App however they want.

This is not true, Google is no longer capable of changing anything internally, it's like a government in that respect, it can make a new process/program (that might on the surface make some things look better) but underneath the old system is still there.

This is a good read on the topic (the author has been on a few podcasts also)

https://www.amazon.com/Kidnap-Inside-Business-Anja-Shortland...

TLDR: Its basically an efficient market in some countries, most people have kidnap insurance even though they dont know it (as their employer isnt allowed to diclose this insurance), the insurers know the criminals going rate, and can cut off their entire business if they break the "rules"

More like sunk in cost of a HR department/Property management department

The people making these decisions wouldn't have jobs if the "company culture" was all remote.

"Google announced that 20 percent of its workforce would be able to work from home permanently"

Google gets a lot of PR cred for this but its not the case at all.

They "estimated" that 20% of workers would be remote at their management chains discretion. Ie pretty much the same policy they've always had (you can be remote if you get permission, but you'll be the odd one out).

3 days in is just a trick, if you need to commute the majority of the week why not commute the other two days (vs moving somewhere further out with a better WFH setup).

The main benefit for amazon's tools is once you've been there a while you know how they work, and all the complexity and bugs have been stripped out of them. And because they force engineers to go oncall everyone has a pretty good idea of how to fix things.

When you have SRE's spending all day creating the next new thing (generally after deprecating the previous one with no replacement), you end up in a situation where you forget how to say, rollback a bad deployment. Or scale a fleet.

The problem with fancy infrastructure as code, containers and logging services is when they break you have no idea how to get out of trouble. SSH and grep almost always work, as does symlinking a directory.