Typical US tech jobs are the same.

When HN comments talk about tech jobs they often mean specific, high-compensation or highly competitive companies.

Moreover, for creative professions, including programming and engineering, the number of "worked" hours is emphasized only by incompetent managers who do not really know how to measure the productivity of the employees.

When competent programmers or engineers have a difficult problem to solve, they will think about it all the time, regardless whether they are "working" long hours in the office or they are doing any other activities, at home or on the street.

It is quite frequent to have the best ideas when you are not in the office "working". For things like programming or designing, the time required to type on a keyboard the solution is never a bottleneck.

At least for myself, the majority of the technical solutions to the problems that I have worked have come to my mind at home, in the morning, immediately when waking up, and the "work" done in the office has always been mostly in typing whatever solution I already had in mind when arriving at the office.

Anyone who believes that a programmer or engineer who "works" e.g. a 50-hour week is more productive than one who "works" a 40-hour week is naive, to not use a more insulting word.

I’ve worked in companies that are not highly compensated or highly competitive and they were still like this. 40 hours was the “floor”, not the ceiling. If you worked 40 hours you were the bottom of the barrel, inevitably the first to be let go should things come to that.