You usually are forced to work long hours when: -management mismanages your project -Sales sells customers on a new feature within a vastly reduced time frame.

You usually are forced to work long hours when: -management mismanages your project -Sales sells customers on a new feature within a vastly reduced time frame..without consulting the development team -Management decides to change around the current goals of your project, without changing the deadline I once was brought on to a new project as a consultant that originally had a deadline of a year, this was reduced to 3 months after management dragged their feet, and I was expected to get it done..with the same amount of features in that new time frame. I got it done in 6 weeks..but I had to work lots of extra hours to accomplish this. Luckily, I was able to bill them as a consultant...and not as a regular employee. The crazy part is the company that gave me the project had a staff of salaried developers that only work on these sorts of death march projects. They charge a premium as a business..and probably do very well..but the stress of it has got to be pretty bad. He's right. You really don't need to work long hours..when you have a good management team. But this is the exception to the rule in my experience.