It's definitely not an ideal life, but seems to be increasingly the norm among individual contributor positions at the big guys (Google, Apple, Amazon, etc). What's more is that on paper, these same companies espouse 'work-life' balance, while those who try to leave there laptops at work after hours end up on probation like the individual in this article.

I specifically kept it vague for reasons of anonymity, as these types of statements have cost people their jobs in the past, and also due to the fact that what I described was work habits of people I talk to across different engineering roles (software, hardware, infrastructure) in the company I work for.

You can work less than 60 hours, but it will show in your output, as deadlines are aggressive and set tops down.

Examples of the kind of thing someone is answering emails in the early morning for is bugs discovered in your code, a regression that's failing, or something found that's blocking another coworkers' progress (since they were working late into the night as well).

> What exactly do they do that requires 60 hours of work and no less?

It's not so much the type of work, but other factors like volume, availability and perceived engagement. Even if you were capable of getting done in 20 hours what takes 60 hours for someone else you'd be expected to be available to help the team or respond to issues. Often times, in these types of environments you'll be expected to reply to issues quickly, respond to managers/leads if there's a question and these will arise at any moment within those 60 work hours, because even though you finished "your tasks" the team is still working to finish theirs and you're expected to be around "adding value".

As regards to the "checks emails", the task can literally be anything: a question regarding code, a response to an inquiry, a prompt for a decision on some topic, or a request for information that's needed ASAP. I've seen organizations that track the time taken to get a reply to these emails and they keep track in Excel sheets the average response time from individuals and their number of responses.

For example, I've also seen people get reported to management for taking a nap during their lunch break, even though they had finished their assigned task. The details of the tasks become irrelevant in those types of toxic environments.