Big Tech is hundreds of thousands of employees across thousands of teams with a wide variety of work environments. The author's experience sounds really rough, but it also doesn't make sense to generalize from there to this whole piece of the industry.
To give another data point, I've worked at a different Big Tech company since 2012, on two different teams, and haven't experienced anything like this. There's no pressure to work after hours, on weekends, or vacations. Just today I was debugging a release blocker with a coworker, and it got to be 4:30, which was when they had planned to end their day. It wouldn't even have occurred to me to suggest they stay late: we can pick it up on Monday and the release can slip.
I'm sure there are people at my company who have experiences closer to the author's: what I'm trying to say is that Big Tech is a big place, and if you find yourself somewhere with bad culture don't take that to mean there aren't other places you would like.
To give another data point, I've worked at a different Big Tech company since 2012, on two different teams, and haven't experienced anything like this. There's no pressure to work after hours, on weekends, or vacations. Just today I was debugging a release blocker with a coworker, and it got to be 4:30, which was when they had planned to end their day. It wouldn't even have occurred to me to suggest they stay late: we can pick it up on Monday and the release can slip.
I'm sure there are people at my company who have experiences closer to the author's: what I'm trying to say is that Big Tech is a big place, and if you find yourself somewhere with bad culture don't take that to mean there aren't other places you would like.