I can confirm that we happily worked nitty days for a very long time and the perks helped keep us happy and sane. After some number of years though, your personal well of energy starts to dry up and no amount of weird crap in a fridge is going to solve it. We were very productive until that point though.

> in the service of company productivity

This is the only thing I question, given the mix of data suggesting the opposite is true. Stanford ran a project about it some time ago: https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/projects/crunc...

That may boil down to execution, though. That project emerged out of pretty scathing posts from the boiler room programming environments of EA. I'm pretty confident Google operates very differently, and probably learned from those calamities.

I doubt it.

We know that over work reduces creativity and productivity. Hell, as an outsider you can practically see this in what Google offers; they’ve totally lost their way and keep rehashing the same products in repeatedly inferior ways.

Rather, I think that they feel that it’s more productive or that it gives them more control. Neither of which is a rational argument