But what's the most important thing in finance IT business is to keep with business knowledge. Having only pure IT skills will get you nowhere. You need to understand a business side of your finance domain which means being able to easily communicate with your clients/customers in their language. It's pretty common to see IT guys in finance having Series 7/24/63 or CFA certificates on their resume (I'm one of them). Again if you want to be in finance IT business for a long haul, focusing on general IT knowledge only is not enough.
I don't think that's happening at companies like Google and Facebook. Companies like that bend over backward to prevent their workers from burning out (massages, healthy cafeteria meals). When people burn out after 2-4 years, they leave behind legacy horrors (speaking of vampires) and that can easily cancel out any benefits you get by working people 60+ hours per week.
I heard someone talking about how IBM/Intell/etc... hire PhD's right out of grad school, train them for 6 months, squeeze all the creative energy and effort out of the employee they can for 2-4 years, and then expect the employee to want to go work elsewhere b/c they're burned-out. The productivity they get in those 2-4 years is worth burning out employees.
This also happens in finance, where jobs right out of school are 60-80+ hour weeks for a few years. Then you land a nicer position (likely in management) once you've cut your teeth.
Is there evidence that a similar thing is happening at the Google/Facebooks too?