I don't get this statement. Google doesn't force anyone to work overnight. It doesn't force you to work at all, to be honest. Some people can spend a workday skiing and then arrive at 6 pm for dinner. TC is 400K. And once you're bored or feel undercompensated, you just go to FB, Netflix or Snapchat and get a 30-50% pay rise.
But you're an inconsequential cog, and in order to get a decent bonus and _any_ RSU refresh at all (which is the majority of that 400K btw) you have to jump through insane hoops and shave yaks all day. At some point it feels like Dostoevsky's labor camp description: you dig a hole and then you fill it back up. Except this is a very comfy labor camp, with 3 meals a day, and you can leave if you want to.
But some of us like to actually make things, and have a sense of purpose, and other things higher up on the Maslow's pyramid of needs. For them Google of 2019 is mostly not a good place, unless they end up on teams (and in positions on those teams) where they can do work that's meaningful to them, rather than copy proto buffers in some soon-to-be deprecated backend. Meaningful work is scarce there, and has been for at least the last decade, and a lot of people are competing for it.
In the grand scheme of things everybody is an inconsequential cog. You, me and everybody you know are average people who will grind away at whatever thing we happen do. You aren't gonna change the world. I'm not gonna change the world. Accept this and move on.
> Meaningful work is scarce there
"Meaningful work" is in the eye of the beholder. Learning to find joy in whatever task you are working on is an important skill to learn.
Being a very highly paid "inconsequential cog" at a mega-corp and working below market at some dinky startup can be the difference between actually affording to buy a house. It can mean you get to retire years earlier than you would have otherwise. It can mean putting your kids through a top notch education program. It buys you a lot of things.
The entirety of one's world view is defined by their perception. If you can convince yourself you're not a cog at Google, hey, more power to you, enjoy those golden handcuffs. But if not, there are plenty of options out there which let you pay mortgage, put your kids through college, and "buy a lot of things". It doesn't have to be FANG.
