Yes it is, but also not really. Basically, you get what you can with the leverage you have. Tech jobs seem to have gotten themselves in a salaried position, and

Yes it is, but also not really. Basically, you get what you can with the leverage you have. Tech jobs seem to have gotten themselves in a salaried position, and I think that's just the compromise that tech workers were able to negotiate with companies. It be really nice to just clock in and clock out. Not care about how much work is remaining, and operate like a barista, I just show up, serve up some lines of code, a few code reviews, hand out a few estimates and suggest a technical approach to business and then on the dot clock out. If the company feels things aren't going fast enough, they'd need to work harder to not waste my precious clock-in time, keep me busy on the most important things always, or pay me double for extra time. But instead they started to approach employees with the salaried proposition, and some people said yes. So here we are. Now it's not that bad, you need to learn to manage your own time, your own work/life balance. It does mean you can decide what hour to show up to work and when to leave (to some extent). It means your launch break can be twice as long if you want it to be sometimes. It also means that if things aren't going as fast as they need too, it's your responsability to manage your time and commitments better. It's up to you now to make sure you are focused and kept working on the most important thing, that you say no to distractions and make sure the processes favor productivity instead of churn and endless debates. It's up to you to make sure you don't take on work that won't deliver on expectations, and thus up to you to manage those expectations, etc. But it means sometimes you can take more vacation than you technically have to take as long as your manager and team can work them in, etc. The biggest downside to me is that it makes the environment more competitive. Basically how much your coworkers will choose to work will set the standards, and it'll be hard for you to do less. If people start responding to emails at night and on weekends, if people make late fridays the norm, or extra Sunday "catch up on todos" a norm, you kind of have too as well now. So when you have a family and outside commitments I think it gets harder to manage, because you can't easily plan around variable hours, you have a more unpredictable schedule, you don't really know if next month will be extra busy and you'll need to push in to the evenings or if it'll be the opposite, etc.