The last time I did a job search, one of the questions I started asking in interviews was “what distinguishes an employee at your company who meets your expectations from someone who is truly outstanding”? If the response was phrased in terms of hours per week, I knew that was not the company for me.
This is probably the most important comment on HN this month. Seriously. Steal that line. Even if you /dev/null'ed the answer (which you shouldn't) the fact that you asked the question has significant value for you in terms of positioning.
As a manager, I personally stress having a sustainable work schedule and work-life balance.
In practice, over the course of 20 years, the developers I have managed that are "truly outstanding" work more at developing their craft and work habits, usually on their own time.
That usually manifests itself in being much more productive during work hours, which is what will actually distinguish them. I don't think that happens by accident and without working extra at it -- at least, I didn't find a way to do that for myself.
I'm not surprised that employees are judged by hours worked, but I'm very surprised that an interviewer would have the awareness and honesty to say so in an interview. Was it at least rare?
I (fortunately) didn’t build up a very large sample size, but there was one junior guy I spoke to who started his answer with “a normal engineer will show up at 9:00 and leave at 6:00...”. He did backpedal a bit when I questioned him more closely about the time expectations, and I had other reasons for choosing not to work for that company.
