work-life balance should not come at the expense of some of the workers pulling more than their fair share of work.

I.E a junior that is just learning terraform vs. a staff that has used it 3 years?

Maybe not. In the corporate world, 90% of work is work that was generated by other work. Some people are really good at not causing work for other people.

Pls don't say FANG (or MANG or whatever). People I know at the senior level work really hard too (from my peers).

They spend a lot of hours but they don't really accomplish that much. The thing about FAANGs is that above the $250k line, it's all politics. If you're any good at the game, you figure out that you'll always do better using political position to take credit for someone else's work than taking the chance of your own labor (how much can one person do?) being appreciated.

Always get a team if you can: it diversifies your apparent contribution to the company.

It's common for office workers to have at least 3-4 meetings a day which basically destroys the day already. You'll have only tiny snippets of productive time left, which are then again interrupted by email and chat. It would actually be a challenge to come to 2 hours of productive time in such a day.

It used to be that only managers were stuck in meetings and email all day long but now the same applies to office workers that actually need to produce something. A meeting is not a product, your customers didn't order a meeting and you can't ship a meeting.

Anyway, thanks for picking up the slack. I'm back to playing flappy bird now.

It's either this, or they have some unrealistically narrow view of what constitutes work.

I've worked with engineers who were concerned they only "worked" 4 hours per day because they only counted time spent writing code in the code editor. Had to remind a lot of people that communication, meetings, and other job-related activities are also work.

But there are also a lot of people who do the 2 hour per day thing by shifting as much work as possible to other people. They might do bursts of intense work when they know other people are watching, but it's back to the minimum as soon as they're not being closely observed any more.

The other half of that equation is to change jobs frequently. It can take a year or longer for some managers or companies to catch on to employees who aren't really doing much work, at which point the person can easily move on to the next job and start the process again.