Well.. sort of. My partner was doing 80% for 80% at goog for many years, which sounds like a good deal. Except the demands were more like 40-50 hours/week, with management always saying that full-timers were working way more than 50 hours, so at 80% salary you better be working 40-50hrs/wk.
In Europe such scaling is generally guaranteed by law, and I don’t think any big company would be stupid enough to be caught cheating. And based solely on anecdata I think at least as many people are “phoning it in” at Google as at any other company regardless of salary.
Hope it worked out for your partner. Being exploited with lots of privilege is still being exploited.
[0]: Google famously used to let workers spend 20% of their time working on anything they wanted (for the company’s benefit) but bad managers, which turned out to be most managers, did not reduce the load of “normal” work, so it became known as 120% time.
[edit] past tense, they may no longer work there
Not sure if your manager is forced to give you that option but it didn't seem to be hard to get at least. I think by default such requests gets accepted and your manager would need to give a good reason why you couldn't work part time.
This isn't true. Google allows you to "scale" your work (eg 80% pay for 80% time).