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I hope you all read A Christmas Carol over the holiday. For the updated version, check out this item over at Seeing the Forest. I'll excerpt the quote that Dave uses as a jumping-off point:

"There's something at an individual level that people in the [Silicon] Valley have to sign up to do, as well. In this globally competitive marketplace, you have engineers in China that go to work from 8 (a.m.) to 10 (p.m.). The company feeds them lunch, a great lunch. They have great facilities, equal to the Valley. They serve them a great dinner, and they work six days a week. They go home to be with their families during a month during Chinese New Year. But after that, they're working hard, and they're really dedicated to what they're doing.

And so we have to recover from the sense of entitlement. Individuals have to want to get retrained. They're going to have to want to work hard. Sometimes I wonder whether or not we've lost that in the Valley."

Yeah, there's the problem all right. We Americans have gone soft. We feel like we're entitled to rational work hours and seeing our families more than occasionally. Not that the executives feel the need to apply the same standards to themselves, of course. But Dave says it better. Go read it.