Ex-Googler here, now working on my own startup. I had weeks at Google with 14 hour days and time in on the weekends. I also had weeks where I worked 4-6 hours/day and put away the phone & laptop on the weekend, or even ducked out at 2:30 on a Friday afternoon so I could celebrate my anniversary with my girlfriend.

I appreciate the sentiment of the article, but there's a lot of complexity to the issue that it ignores. For one, most of the time that I was working crazy hours was because I a.) wanted and b.) needed to. I believed in the project's mission, the work was fun & challenging, and there was a lot to do that just wouldn't get done if I didn't put in the hours.

Similarly, when I worked very light hours, it was because there wasn't much work that I had to do. I was blocked on other teams, or in-between projects and my manager didn't have a good idea where I'd be productive at the moment, or "held in reserve" so that if we needed to react quickly to market opportunities I'd be well-rested and not occupied by other projects.

Working hard is not always a bad thing, or onerous, or exhausting. Sometimes employees work hard because they believe in what they're doing and want to do a good job; that's part of what makes a company a good place to work, after all. And sometimes it is, and creates a very unhealthy competition where everybody tries to outdo each other. I think that one of the things that Google in general and Larry Page in particular realizes is that people will have different desires for work/life balance at different stages in their life, and that within a large company, there should be places that can accommodate everyone from the achievement-oriented new Ph.D grad to the family with a young kid.