This is pretty much spot on. I live in San Mateo. Firstly, what I pay for my basic apartment here would have easily put me in one of the nicest places back home. Nightlife doesn't exist. The traffic is horrible if you are headed up into SF or down into San Jose. I manage to save $1K per month on my six figure salary. At first, that sounds like I'm doing pretty well; however, look up the cost of a house in the Bay Area. In August when my lease is up, I'm taking what I have managed to save, and I'm going home to where I can afford to live, not merely sleep.
I come from banking in the Midwest. While I worked some long hours occasionally, it was never as bad as what I have experienced here in Silicon Valley. I'm specifically talking about the geographical Silicon Valley, not just the tech scene in the area. On top of that, I'm going to claim unrealistic work / life balance is something common to this part of the country. I've returned to banking out here, and I still find there is an unrealistic expectation of how many hours an employee should work a week.
With that said, I don't really mind the long hours if I am properly compensated. It's not the long hours that bother me. It's the thought that I have nothing better to do than to serve the company at any time of the day. Employment is a mutually beneficial economic relationship. Out here, it seems that a lot of employers think the employees should be thankful they are allowed to work there.
I moved out to Silicon Valley a little over two years ago. My experience with the area has had its positives and negatives, but it has mostly been negative.
I worked in QA for a little over a year at a startup in Mountain View. Firstly, the hours were horrible. I was consistently working twelve hours a day during the week and at least four hours a day one day per weekend. This was finally pared back after I and another member of the QA team started to complain about the hours. Neither the pay nor the equity I received was really fair for the amount of work I put in.
Furthermore, whenever I attempted to advance my skills beyond the QA position, I was blocked again and again. I was only allowed to commit code after I got fed up with an issue, fixed it myself, and basically begged a developer to look at it. It was a two-line fix; however, most of the developers assumed I couldn't write code properly simply because I didn't have a CS background.
Lastly, it was the management layer directly above that finally made me decide to quit. My manager and one of the developers I worked with consistently had this annoying feud going on between them. I was always stuck in the middle of it. All I wanted to do was to complete my job and go home without a headache. Towards the end, that became impossible.
So, if you want to work long hours for horrible compensation, to be pigeonholed into a position and never be allowed to grow your skills, and to be surrounded by people who cannot seem to grow up, then come to Silicon Valley and try your hand at being part of something that may or may not become the next greatest company.