[orangecat]

Soon enough, everyone is working more and more to catch up to you, and everyone's miserable.

That's an argument against high performance regardless of hours. But I doubt many Googlers are miserable because they have to "compete" with Jeff Dean.

[insuffi]

I guess it is. It sounds wrong to me as well, but there's only so much performance you can fit into certain hours. Thus, more hours are bound to become the norm, in my opinion.

[nostrademons]

That assumes productivity remains constant, which has historically been a poor assumption, both in the economy at large and with individual people. When you do something a lot and have a modicum of intelligence (and most Googlers do), you figure out new, more efficient ways of doing things. That lets you accomplish more while working shorter hours.

The unfortunate thing is that if you're really good at making things more efficient, people want you to do it all the time, but if you're paid for results (Googlers are) and decent at setting boundaries (by and large Googlers aren't, but this is an individual-responsibility thing), you can work out compromises that give you both professional advancement and time for a life.