There ought to be a database of companies that give offers with very short expirations. Not necessarily condemning the practice, but it would be good to know. Yelp, for example, routinely gives offers with a 5-day acceptance window.
There ought to be a database of tech companies with shady employment practices, period.
I think that's glassdoor.com.
This is every company. I've never heard of any company giving more than 3-5 days. If you work for a big corp, you know how unbelievably insecure management is, any delay at all would make them look very bad politically. When a hiring manager's whole career is based on appearances, which it usually is, a week is an eternity.
I totally agree with you for most job offers. This article, though, is directed toward college students looking for summer jobs and internships. For a position that starts 7 months from now I would expect a longer window to be acceptable.
A large Seattle company gives at least two weeks to graduating students. The new graduate market is fairly specific, though, with lots of fairly interchangeable people coming on market at the same time.
The career office at my school requires 2 weeks for students, including internships. Most of them play by the rules but I did have an internship offer that wanted a decision in 24 hours.
Sometimes the insecurity is justified. I've seen former managers extend offers only to retract them two days later when the staff requisition was retracted by upper management. If you're on a project and you need people this encourages you to hire as quickly as possible.
We did this to several candidates we wanted to hire and they all stopped responding to us. Good people do not like to be fucked with, and now we have a bunch of idiots working in our department (who do not mind being fucked with, because getting paid to do nothing is better than not getting paid to do nothing).