[tdeck]

People always being this up and I think they're right to be skeptical, but the Google office I worked in (SF) was practically dead before 10 AM and after 7 PM. I never saw much evidence that any sizable group was working extra long hours. Some people hung around for dinner at 6:30 but most left before or right after grabbing food. I didn't spend enough time in Mountain View to form an informed opinion but there was definitely a big group leaving between 5 and 6:30.

[paxys]

People made this up because everyone needed a reason to put down the Google engineers who were suddenly getting better salaries and perks than the rest of the industry at the time. There was never any truth to the whole "employees stay at work all the time". Google has consistently had fantastic work life balance, as do most other similar large companies. It's the mid-tier ones that are sweatshops.

[dralley]

Of course, it helps that Google is, if these documents are accurate, literally stealing from basically everyone else (what company doesn't use Google adsense / AdWords)