Rather cynical. You're basically just assuming everything they say about the job must be a lie.

Having worked for Amazon before I'd say that's a fairly safe assumption.

Sounds more like experienced than cynical to me. In my experience, job descriptions and even the answers you get during interviews are not so much outright lies, as aspirational fabrications you have to take with a grain of salt.

I'm guessing you haven't worked for Amazon.

Job descriptions are forward looking statements; the position may be entirely different.

Here are some of the many possibilities:

The service has poor uptime and you're on call every weekend.

Schedule pressure or poor management means that you're asked to come in on Fridays "until the next release".

The reduced-hours position was sponsored by a VP who has lost interest or left the company. Your direct manager has deadlines to meet and pressures you into working full-time.

"Foresight is often mistaken as cynicism by those that do not have it."

Assuming that Amazon is a profit-maximizing corporation that will fully exploit it's human resources to the extent possible, and that forward-looking but non-binding statements cannot be relied on to limit that might be called cynicism but to me it looks a lot like realism.

Amazon became big on lies, and in fact is in the news frequently because it continues to do so.

Corporations exploit the benefit of the doubt. It mustn't be extended to them.

I'd say it's evidence based skepticism

I know that's the popular cynical view, but I'd think with such a position (especially given that it was advertised as reduced hours), there would be 20% lower expectations as to what you'll accomplish. In other words, they'd expect it would take five weeks for you to do what someone else can do in four.

I mean, that's all they have to determine/enforce how much you time you put in currently... general expectations.

Some people say you work the hours needed to get the job done, but that doesn't really make sense. Somehow the work the company needs to get accomplished gets divided up and distributed to employees. And ultimately you've got to think of how much is reasonable to accomplish. Here, that expectation of reasonableness is going to get reduced by about 20% if they are hired to work that many less hours.

there have been many studies that show that people who consistently work less hours are more productive per hour. generally going from 40 hours to 32 hours i'd be surprised if the difference in productivity was more than 5-10% (it may even be positive).

Besides being a founder, I've never had a programming job that's required such outside of mostly rare incident responses.

Who works on Fridays anyway?

I work harder than ever on Fridays. Mondays I get nothing done.