The friend got a job at Google, and as far as I can tell, is supporting their spouse's dedication to this job search.
I just don't have ... that. Give me a decent project and weekends, please.
Your friend is a saint. Those types of multi-postdoc job hunts usually end in divorce. I can't imagine that PLUS another PhD.
If I were doing that, it would almost certainly stem from an unhealthy fixation.
But that's a sampling problem. If you listen to that too much, you end up like this person. The 9X.YY% of those who want to be a professor probably had all that, plus a healthy dose of realism to get out while the getting is good. The absolute worst part of all this is that very few profs seem all that happy.
Kind of like CEOs, but I think being a wage-earning, low-to-moderately successful founder has a higher likelihood of panning out than being a wage-earning professor by a long shot.
Tenure-track faculty have barely any time to breathe given all the hassle they have to go through. It's mostly done by grad students who are still learning the ropes. Ofc. this is different in places like Math depts. where it can't work the way it does in CS/EE.