Another glaring omission - he’s now sitting on 7 years of savings from his Google manager salary & equity. If you have a few million dollars in the bank it’s much easier to take the pay cut to work at a smaller startup and chase a more high risk/high reward outcome.

It’s completely out of touch to judge anyone for wanting a stable and in the scheme of things ridiculously high paying job with good work life balance, like working at Google.

It's such a weird dynamic.

I remember visiting the valley for the first time for a big company I worked for at another location. The scale of work life balance was unbalanced so many strange ways...

The tech support team I worked with was in 'building 3'. Nobody ever left that building through out the day. I went to the big cafeteria and the options were amazing. I managed to get some of my peers to go with me, several of my peers from building 3 were equally amazed as ... they never went there, they just worked all day, ate something at their desk, and kept working...

Meanwhile I'd go to the cafeteria each day and sit outside and watch as some folks would play basketball for an hour, then a while later show up and chat it up with coworkers (not talking about work) over lunch for what seemed like forever...

The game room was always full of the same guys, the other amenities, yoga, etc, and it often included people who I simply never could get a hold of. HR couldn't be bothered to get security to take my photo for my badge for weeks ... because the gym schedule changed.

It was a weird, unbalanced, yin and yang.

He's giving a few examples for work-life balance and I have completely different feelings about - from the 11 AM Yoga class (pretty ridiculous IMO) to taking a personal day (reasonable, people need their day off, maybe the personal day is for an urgent medical check-up?) to working during the weekend (unless the entire service is down and I'm the oncall, it can wait).

It's the sprint versus marathon mindset.

A small startup has a finite amount of time to either become a big company in their own right or do something so noteworthy that a big company sees the need to acquire them. Nothing else matters. There are minimal incentives to invest in the long-term welfare of your employees because in the long term, the company doesn't exist. You can't even guarantee that an acquisition will keep the employees you have invested in.

Large corporations like Google are incentivized to give their employees reasons to stick around. They can expect the company will be there in 30 years, and they can expect a good employee to put in a career's worth of work for them (and eventually have peer and mentorship contacts that encourage other good potential employees to join the company).

This is painting with a broad brush of how the incentives are structured... Not all big companies see it this way and not all small companies see it this way. But it's the behavior the marketplace appears to reward.

The same people that go for an 11 AM yoga class will stay working until 11 PM because they can and are encouraged to.

Second, and another commenter points this out, the desirability of anyone that lands a job at a FAANG means they get away with it. They have Made It, they are the 1% in their field, and they can go anywhere else outside of SF (internationally if need be) and instantly be hired as CTO of any company. Generally speaking. And of course switch to the other FAANG, possibly getting even better compensation and perks and a better 11am yoga teacher.

I am self-employed and 11am (or, in my case, anywhere within the 11am-3pm window) exercise is actually a great refreshment for my mind.

"When I was growing up in Tech in the ‘90’s - there was no such thing as work life balance."

BS. I worked for a large computer systems company throughout the 1990s. I mostly headed home by 5-6 and I would take month long vacations. (Of course, there crunch times as well.)

I also found his pissiness at apparently not being able to curse or whatever in presentations sort of offputting. Yes, general standards for language and behavior in the tech industry has shifted over time. This isn't anything specific to Google. And whining about it comes off as being tone deaf.