That's nonsense. They're hard work but they're not, like, that hard. Depends on the team of course. But people get weird ideas like this from forums/external discussion. nobody things that at the actual jobs.
I have been verbally shamed for wanting to spend time with my wife and kids rather than work. This is why I refuse to work in any Bay Area tech today.
Google and Microsoft were known as tech retirement homes to rest and vest at. We have the stupid TikTok videos to prove it too. How is it that some get so overworked and others do none?
Of course there are crunch times, but the majority of the time WLB was great. In fact, there are definitely a group of folks who seem to be permanently coasting.
There are bad companies and bad teams, but saying all of tech in the bay area operates this way is just wrong.
Downplaying it given the amount of people who come out to talk about this very thing, as you are doing, also is just wrong.
I’ve been trying to tell people for years that my experiences at multiple companies, and talking to many, many other devs I met in the area and at conferences, indicate a serious problem in tech that we need take address.
There are always people who will come out and say “well I didn’t have that experience so it doesn’t exist”.
The top-level post in this thread is just _wrong_ as a general statement (well, at least the bit "you'll need to work on POCs (new products) in your off-time. Most of these companies don't schedule innovation' for instance"), although there may be specific instances where those are true, and pretending like it isn't means that people's criticisms of these companies are criticizing them for fictional grievances instead of real ones, which makes those criticisms far weaker and easier to fend off.
Sounds like you just spent too long in the company.
Hire young people with no personal obligations and gaslight them into believing if they don’t live and breathe work they’re “not a team player”.
I have spent two decades in SV and this is simply not true. My partner has spent a similar time and barring one bad experience for 2 years, the rest of it aligns with mine. Maybe, you got stuck in some shithole?