Since my top-comment is #1 and it's a bad example, I'll give a positive example here. In this company I joined I worked really hard. It was very exciting work,

Since my top-comment is #1 and it's a bad example, I'll give a positive example here. In this company I joined I worked really hard. It was very exciting work, an innovative startup, pretty good pay (for my locale), great coworkers and manager. I still worked around ~8h/day, but those were VERY intense 8-hours and after few weeks it was clear that our office/team was shipping A LOT faster than other teams in HQ. It was a really nice combination IMHO: - Our manager was amazing at getting the work requests and converting them into technical tasks/projects, while shielding us of the BS that was literally raining from HQ. No one lasted too long when he eventually left, and they even closed the office a bit after. - Because of the timezone difference, we had meetings for 1-2h in the morning and then calm for the rest of the day to execute on those tasks. Our manager had more, but that was a really good balance for IC. - While we had different levels of seniority (and all hired as the same "mid-level"), we worked well together and all were reasonably knowledgeable, no one needed handholding. So yeah, after few months/1 year we got some major projects finished. One of which I made the major technical part, for which I struggled and fought like never before, and successfully delivered it. Our CEO used this project even for presentations to our investors and clients (was supposed to be an internal tool). So my manager got me from mid-level ("Software Engineer") to Staff Engineer, a whole 2-level bump and 40%-50% salary increase approx. So sometimes working hard does pay off :)