I'm not surprised that employees are judged by hours worked, but I'm very surprised that an interviewer would have the awareness and honesty to say so in an interview. Was it at least rare?
I (fortunately) didn’t build up a very large sample size, but there was one junior guy I spoke to who started his answer with “a normal engineer will show up at 9:00 and leave at 6:00...”. He did backpedal a bit when I questioned him more closely about the time expectations, and I had other reasons for choosing not to work for that company.