You need to make decisions in a high-uncertainty environment. If you care about your work... it's much more stressful to have actual decision power than to have none and just vent with your colleagues about how bad the top-level decisions are.
It depends on the person I guess. Sometimes you're stuck with a poorly defined project that you don't believe in and there's no one to really validate your work. Leads to a feeling of meaninglessness and purposelessness and that your time and energy could be offered in a much more meaningful way.
Impact (on others, on myself permanently) correlates very well to stress for me.
High impact decisions cause more stress: getting a project defunded, letting go of people, critical mistakes in execution that cause the company reputation or finance damages, etc..
At the very far end are life and death decisions that impact others and the very low end day-to-day decisions that only impact you (what tasks to complete, what shoes to wear).
With the above framework, it's unlikely highly paid Googlers made low impact and thus low stress decisions.
Low impact can also be stressful for me (I might be unusual). First, there is guilt that you are being paid all this money to twiddle your thumbs. After you stop feeling guilty for the wealthy corporation, you realize that you aren't fulfilled if you aren't achieving anything meaningful, which causes you to go on a stressful hunt to scratch any real impact out of the available work.
Then after still achieving nothing, you get nice ratings on your performance reviews, and then you realize that barely anyone is actually having any real impact. There is an enormous organ you are attached to that absorbs money to write fluffy annual performance reviews.
Then you eat ice cream in the nap pod hoping that you can feel content with your extreme comfort, but the most meaningful change in your mental state is a mild brain freeze.
Impact matters but I think stress comes into play when you feel like things are going more wrong than right. And I wouldn’t say that most high paying tech responsibilities are anywhere near life or death decisions. But are much closer to comfortably fun and compelling challenges.
