If you have a sufficiently large number of employees (in the tens of thousands), basic laws of statistics say that eventually you will see nearly all of the types of medical emergencies that are experienced by people going about their ordinary day to day lives everywhere. Heart attacks, strokes, grand mal seizures, etc. It's unfortunate and sad but I don't think trying to equate "Google = Bad Thing that Stresses Employees Until they Break" is fair.<p>In fact I bet if you had access to the aggregated private medical data of 10,000 google employees and compared it to 10,000 randomly chosen people from the population at large, the google people experience less medical emergencies. To put it crassly, because they have higher salaries and better access to preventative medical care than 10,000 randomly chosen American citizens from all socioeconomic classes.
It looks like VB is taking one incident somewhere in Atwater/Merced and attributing it to work culture of the co at large. From my limited interaction with googlers as well as hearsay, it would rather seem very atypical of what goes on over there. For me most part they seem somewhat coddled rather than overworked.<p>And then as if that unfounded generalization were not enough, they also sprinkled something about harassment and bro culture --which as far as I understand, google fights very hard against. I mean, it would seem the last big co one could accuse of sex harassment and bro culture would be google. Someone wanted to try to write something explosive where there isn't.