I think she is merely recounting a story from the early days of Google and relating it to the larger problem of employee burnout. I know quite a few current Googlers and as far as I understand nothing so ridiculous happens there now. Of course the problem is incredibly relevant to Startups: I would never enjoy myself in such a restrictive situation unless I was working on my idea but again different people have different tolerance levels...
I don't disagree, and I'm trying to criticize Mayer here--I think the "article" is a bit poorly written, and I imagine some mid-manager somewhere reading it and thinking "oh, I can make my devs works 100 hours a week, as long as I let them eat dinner with their kids once a week."
I think you're right, I certainly don't see much of that kind of thing around here now (there probably are some engineers pulling long hours, but they're the exceptions and it's not generally expected). Could be partly related to the location, although I haven't seen evidence of people doing 80+ hour weeks in other offices yet either.
