Indeed. I worked for Marissa on a project and didn't really feel crushed at all. I actually think she was one of the better managers I've had in SV. But then again I worked at Yahoo.

Still sounds crazy. We cruise in between 9 and 10, bail between 4 and 5 and take an hour lunch. Also we tend to work from home 2-3 days a week.

Then again, they realise that we generate about 650k a year in real hard cash per head which is pretty good :) That's how a company should look.

we have to buy our own lunch though and spend our spare time doing some reading and self tuition.

So do we, I know lots of fellow google devs that work from home a couple of days a week. Some of us also work on the shuttle during our commute so we can count that as work and therefore get home earlier and spend more time with friends and family than those with similar commute times but no company shuttles.

I've been pretty highly entertained by the complete and utter inability of the other commenters to recognize her examples as edge cases.

Mayer's explanation should really be read like this:

Employee X has been working 130 hour weeks for the past month. He's looking more than a little worse for wear; he's probably going to burn out soon. Let's sit him down for a chat and make sure he's doing okay. Oh, he's been missing his daughter's soccer games to manage a critical deploy, and those soccer games are super important to him. Alright, let's deal with that. Mandate that someone else take over, de-prioritize the deploy, rework the process so that deploys happen on a different day or a different time... whatever it takes. He might still be working 130 a week, and that's not great, but he gets the critical thing he just can't miss.

"When Google was a young company, she worked 130 hours per week and often slept at her desk." - Nothing from the article suggests this is an edge case. Instead the author seems to perpetuate a very dangerous meme "toughen up and work insane hours if you want to get anywhere in the startup scene".

This meme is dangerous not just because of the effect it has on people who don't subscribe to this, but also because it is just plain wrong. People who work longer hours are not more productive and they do not get more done. Its a simple case of measuring input (hours spent) instead of output (quality code, decisions whatever...), because measuring what matters is not very straight-forward.

I know the statement above doesn't have backing data, just my experience/ observations, but have you seen anything to contradict this statement?