At no point have I ever worked outside of contracted hours, and at no point will I ever do so. Sorry, no, once I did and it lead to me leaving the job..!
And it's harmfully perpetuating the idea that you're expected to do so when you're not paid for the labour.
Becoming senior requires hard work and dedication.
> And it's harmfully perpetuating the idea that you're expected to do so when you're not paid for the labour.
What are you talking about? Seniors earn 2-5x the amount as a junior developer.
Coasting is what shitty PMs and managers do when their plans will only work if their peons are dumb enough to give them free labor.
If you do the bare minimum to get by, you meet expectations. If you want to grow your career, by necessity and definition, you need to go above and beyond in order to exceed expectations, and this requires hard work.
Companies like Google, Facebook, et al. have defined dexpectations in place that juniors must grow into a senior role in N years. If you don't, you'll be fired for underperformance.
So yes, if you're a junior, "just doing the job" is coasting.
You can go above and beyond in 40 hours. Quality, intelligent work does not require overtime.
Hustle culture is simply wrong here. Luckily I could not care less about working at faang or whatever the fuck they're called these days.
"At no point have I ever worked outside of contracted hours" but "once I did"? Anyway, you probably worked at large companies only; I work in a startup and if the other ops guy is offline I do work off-hours because, well, the website won’t go back up by itself.
And yes, an emergency here or there is normal in smaller companies. If they start happening several times in a single year, it's a sign that something is very wrong, but it's not reasonable to expect them never to happen.
Also, a small place will have scheduled out-of-hours work. Those can be well planed or not, and people can be well compensated or not, but they'll always exist.
1) First 2-3 years of career - In these times you learn by simply doing, so if you work on weekends you speed up your learning curve. Past 2-3 years you don't learn anything by doing normal work, so you need your weekends to do actual "levelling up".
2) You have equity in the business or you have a bonus structure that compensates weekend work.
If you are outside those 2 cases, and you are working more than 5 weekends a year (say 2-3 weekends per 6 months for true random business emergencies that almost everyone in the org has to do), you need to leave.