I tell the interviewer that "I will go above and beyond to fulfill my duties". For me "Above and beyond" means that I will try to show up for work and will at least pretend to be interested.

“Oh yes, we value work-life balance. We’re like a family here!”

Both parties lie in an interview. It’s a dance.

I often hear and also tell people “take vacation when you want, we will work around it. Don’t work on vacation.” That’s the bare minimum, no gold star for that. But also “working the weekends should be the exception, not the norm.”

This seems normal at most FANGs/big companies. People also have a lot of choice around when to come in, leave, and have a hybrid in office policy. Where are the lies?

As if companies were straight with you lol, they're experiencing their own poison

A job interview isn’t an exchange of true statements. It’s a game with each player having different goals. Whichever side you’re on, your goal is to win.

And as an interviewer, winning means not hiring the sort of person who's going to do the absolute bare minimum, because then you'd have to suffer through working with them.

Hiring someone who works competently and efficiently for eight hours a day could be better for the company than hiring someone who works twice as long but is not as competent or focused.

Of course!

My experience is people who have the attitude of doing the bare minimum do not have “works competently and efficiently for eight hours a day” as a target in mind when they say that.

For a lot of engineering work, competent and diligent for 30 hours per week could easily out-perform 40.

Yes and your goal also isn’t to hire a person who’s so ambitious and such a go-getter that they’ll hate your dysfunctional organization and leave super fast.