As someone who works at Google, I can say that (at least within my team) people do not tend to work unreasonable hours. People will stay late during crunch time, or when they're on a roll. But there is no expectation that you will work yourself into the ground. There's an expectation of high productivity within a 40 hour work week, plus or minus. There's expectations that people will react to emergencies and deal with them whenever they occur. But there's also an expectation that this will be rare.

That's why I was careful to say that Google expects people to "produce", not work ridiculous hours.

Plus, I have no idea what Google is expecting its works to do these days. You say one thing, employee #20 makes it sound like a meal with the family on Tuesday night is the exception, not the rule.

I will say that if Google doesn't keep a strong work ethic, it will go the way of Apple in the late 80's and early 90's. I was at Apple when the "work hard, play hard" ethic somehow shifted to just "play hard". Apple was on the verge of going out of business for a decade or so because of that lack of drive.

I suspect that's more a result of a response to the low-productivity spiral that burnout seems to be. You lose productivity, so you push yourself harder, so you become less productive, so you feel the need to spend more hours, and soon you end up drained and unable to accomplish anything.

If you're in this spiral, then you need to step back and think of what you need to do to recharge. That might become a realization that "I've stopped spending time with my family; I'm going to make sure I'm at dinner with them every Thursday".

I'd find it extremely strange to hear that someone at Google was prevented from making time to spend time with family on a regular basis. I wouldn't be surprised that an employee in the process of burning out needed encouragement to step back.

  I suspect that's more a result of a response to the low-productivity spiral that burnout seems to be.

I'm a little lost as to which part of my comment this was in response to. At Apple in the early 90's, you could rarely find an engineer at his desk. Working interactively with people was a bit of a mess, what with all the ping pong, foosball, video game playing, the midday trips to the gym, the beer parties, and some peoples' weekly offsites to see a movie. The only people getting any sort of burnout or burns just weren't changing out their bong water often enough.