Agreed with the other comment that this sounds extremely unusual. I started at 45k/yr and now make an order of magnitude more, with jobs that spanned an extremely diverse range of company sizes, lifecycles, and domains - large pre-dotcom tech company, weird mid-size B2B startup, large non-profit, mid-size B2C startup, and now modern tech company. The B2C startup was the only one where I ever worked more than 8 hours a day outside of exceptional circumstances, and even there it was relatively rare.