Oh it absolutely is true. I may put in a 70-80 hour week for an implementation go-live or some dev work that has to be done last minute but besides that you work as many hours as you want to (or don’t want to) work, and unlimited PTO is standard. Anyone in tech that tries to convince you it’s hard is almost invariably very lazy. My lawyer wife works long hard hours. Almost no one in Austin does. When we were still mostly office based I think people at my company spent more time playing ping pong than anything else
I’m glad that the team that I work with doesn’t work at your company then lol.
One thing I do think is overlooked is that, many times in various kinds of IT / Dev projects the code that IS NOT written is more more important that the code that is. Where I see most of the time wasted by the developers under me is when they take bad or erroneous approaches to problems. If you’re playing ping pong but youre discussing a complex coding issue while you’re doing it, then I say you’re still doing work. (I suppose I’m showing my age in that stance).
Time spent staring at a screen -office space style- is not as valuable as time spent discovering the most elegant / appropriate solution.
I’m a huge believer in work smarter not harder. Dont present me a thousand lines of code that do not give me a useable outcome and tell me that you worked harder than the guy who figured out how to give me a useable outcome in 10 lines of code after he researched and pondered on the best solution for a day. I think there are very many poor developers / professionals who think that the amount of work they present shows that they really care about the problem, when in reality it just shows me that they’re not smart enough to get to a better solution.