You are lucky if you think 10-12 hour work days don't exist in software development. You might also be forgetting about flex schedules, core hours may include the entire working day and may be a signal that substituting 9-10am for 5-6pm is not acceptable because you were hired to do a job that depends on your presence when others are also there. There are multiple legitimate reasons that core hours exist in 8 hour blocks in some places.
And that's all moot since the specific hours in this discussion are unrelated to the point @jph was making, which he already stated kindly and clearly.
Many managers are completely oblivious to federal labor laws, unfortunately.
But, I worked in a very well known Hollywood film studio that had mandatory 10 hour work days with an 8 hour core window, not including crunch times. They factored overtime pay into the schedule. This meant that all employees were being paid some 1.5 time, that double-time would hit sooner than you'd think, but also be a lower rate than what you might expect. It was all documented and reported on my tax forms, and within the bounds of California law AFAIK.
http://www.flsa.com/coverage.html
> The job duties of the traditional "learned professions" are exempt.
> Professionally exempt work means work which is predominantly intellectual, requires specialized education, and involves the exercise of discretion and judgment.
Generally meeting anybody from West Coast meant I had to stay late, for some reason I was never able to organize meeting that would have more than one US West Coast person come early to work
Either way, your incredulity is perhaps misplaced. You always have the power to choose the job & hours you want. It might affect how much money you make, what you do, or how other people perceive you, but it's not hard to guarantee you get paid for 40 hours and never work more than 40 hours.
Personally, I don't love working at places where people are obsessively concerned with getting paid for every minute worked and with clocking out at 5pm sharp. By all means, we should have lives outside of work, but I'd rather be working on something fun where the people around me are engaged and are so involved we sometimes don't even notice it's 5:45 than a place where people count down the minutes until they can leave. That's just how I feel now, and I might change my mind. It's a certainly balance, it can go wrong in both directions.
Back to the real topic of this thread: explicit communication of expectations at work is better than not communicating, or unspoken desires or vague rules, right?
