(Opinions are my own)
> The whole "do it for the love of the craft not money" is bullshit propaganda that only serves to keep labor costs low
If this is good or bad is up to interpretation but some people actually enjoy different work cultures. I just joined Google after a ~5 year career at various startups, 2 of them YC backed through Work at a Startup & Bookface.
Google's culture and the culture at startups I've worked at are extremely different. Even the scales of your work are entirely different.
One of my first projects at Google was a "minor" change that resulted in migrating a majority of our users code. This involved a high level design doc, another doc sent to a committee, and for me to actually write the code which involved a series of reviews from my TL. What was essentially a very complex "find and replace" operation took ~2 weeks and it consumed a large percent of my bandwidth so I was operating at ~10% speed on other tasks while this was happening. After this we were planning another "medium sized" project and we were talking about timelines. I was confused about why we don't "just do it" and it turns out this task was going to be taking years.
This is a very different pace to what you get at a startup. At a previous job I rewrote how our entire CI worked. I essentially setup a demo, had another coworker I liked working with look at it and raise concerns, I fixed them, and then I pulled the trigger and migrated us a few days later. This also involved switching us from BitBucket to a self hosted Gitlab (which I setup runners, backups, etc for in ~1 day). We essentially changed the entire way we did development over a week because I decided it was the way to go, one other coworker agreed, and I executed on it and made it happen.
Another time we had a client identify a bug in a build we were going to ship them last minute. This was a "we're going to drop you as a client if this doesn't work" thing. Me and the same coworker had to fix this in 2 weeks or the company was screwed. I found this out as soon as I signed on to slack when my coworker who had been up till 6AM talking to our contact at the other company filled me in. I told him to go to bed and I'd start working on a fix. 1AM rolls around and he wakes up and I'm still working on a fix and feel like I've made no progress. I talk to the coworker and say "We're not going to make it, we're screwed". He tells me to go to bed and he'd work on it assuring me we'll be fine. I wake up the next day and he calls me saying we're screwed and I told him to catch some sleep and he'd I'd work on it and we'll be fine. We trade off like that every day for ~2 weeks including weekends. We pull off a fix using some new tech I was working on and by using standards we were pushing for others to use (unit testing, TDD, my automated deployment pipeline, duct tape, etc). It was exhausting and we both worked like 100hr/week for that time period. The next week the client was pleased, management was like "take whatever time you need that was amazing", and we went on our merry way. I basically vegged out for a week and, whenever I did do work, it was stuff I wanted to clean up anyway due to being bored.
You'd never get what happens at Google to happen at small company (years for a speculative project that may/may not help), and you'd never get what happens at small startups to happen at Google. Is that bad? No. Different people want different things. Honestly, the most fun I've had working in my career were those 3 weeks and working with that coworker. I still talk to him every week to catch up and about how our lives are going (he just bought a house, I'm moving, etc).
Obviously no one wants to work 100hr weeks but I want to work with people who care about the company, what we're doing, where we're going, and who are incentivized to do so (significant stock allocations, etc). I've been lucky enough to find a team like that at Google and at a few of the startups I've worked.
In short: it's not "bullshit propaganda" if you enjoy working with people who care, lack of bureaucracy, management structure, and actually like what you're building.