> I wouldn't be allowed to take my laptop home, so if I had a hard problem to solve, I'd have to stay in the office the whole time. So basically they expected us to never see our family nor collaborate with anyone.
I did. Myself and multiple other commenters all seem to be on the same page, that your original comment says the job required being in the office 8.5 hours per day, and does not allow work from home. Your follow up comments imply the expectations were an order of magnitude higher.
The part you highlighted says you cannot work from home. That’s unrelated to the number of hours they expected you to work.
I think it’s fairly obvious to anyone who has worked in or around finance that while the contractual hours are X, the work requires 2X hours, thus being unable to take your laptop home requires 2X hours in the office.
Perhaps it would have been helpful to actually say that given that this is not a forum aimed at or primarily populated by people who work in or around finance. In a general context, "8:30 to 5 and you can't work from home" sounds like a description of the standard 20th century business schedule.
Are you really, truly not familiar with the idea that the finance industry stereotypically requires long hours and values work over all else, at an institutional level?
OP could have spelled it out, but in any communication there is a level of shared knowledge.
When you read a comment that you understand to be complaining about making nearly a million dollars whilst working 9/5 in the office, a more charitable path would be to examine your own context and shared knowledge, rather than exclaim loudly that OP is a bad person.
When OP wrote they were required to work in the office 8.5 per day, I assumed that they were required to work in the office 8.5 hours per day. I agree with the other guy, if OP meant to claim they were required to work 16 hours in the office per day, they should've spelled that out and not relied on people to guess.
I understand that, yes. But that's not what the original comment says. If the complaint is that ~16 hours is expected, the comment shouldn't focus exclusively on the fact that 8.5 hours is required.
> Are you really, truly not familiar with the idea that the finance industry stereotypically requires long hours and values work over all else, at an institutional level?
Not the person you're replying to, but I was not aware. I guess we have a different cultural backgrounds and some things that are obvious for most of this website are not for me.
Also this makes me even more confused. So OP actually expects being pressured into working overtime (irrelevant where - at home or in the office)? And that's not even their main issue?
What's the point of getting a double salary if you have to work twice as much? Can't they (as a great software developer with a strong work ethics and a good work-life balance they clearly have) just... refuse the overtime?
I do know that finance people tend to be insane workaholics, but I was not aware that "software engineer who happens to work for a finance company" is a fundamentally different kind of job from "software engineer in the tech industry", with a different culture and harsher expectations.
A blind spot, I suppose; I have spent my whole working life in the West Coast tech industry - though discussions on this site generally seem to share that cultural context.
> I wouldn't be allowed to take my laptop home, so if I had a hard problem to solve, I'd have to stay in the office the whole time. So basically they expected us to never see our family nor collaborate with anyone.