This is why I'm a contractor. You want me to work 12 hour days? Ok, I'm capped at 40 hours a week? Well, I guess I'll just work 3 days a week then! Or you can approve me for overtime. But either way I'm getting paid for every hour
I got paid for every hour, and it was my choice to take a job that had 10+ hour days. I was paid overtime when I stayed late or worked weekends. For the most part I liked working in film despite the long hours.
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?
