It's super weird to me because none of the jobs I've had as a programmer have been super demanding of my time or effort? I have to work, sure, but generally not as hard as I had to work at college. I rarely get called to do things outside of work hours, but generally when I do it's because there's a serious problem that I'm the subject matter expert for so it's understandable.

I absolutely do just "switch off" at 5pm. I sometimes work on programming things in my free time if I feel like it regardless.

I feel like, if your job is demanding more of you than a nine to five, and you don't thrive in that environment, you certainly have a right to complain or look for different work. I'm just surprised that it seems to be so common when all the work I've stumbled into in this field has been very reasonable.

And yes, obviously there's a difference between software dev and blue collar, or even other types of white collar work. I'm not blind to the fact that this is a particularly comfortable career, even if it's not as extravagant as it seems to have be a decade or so ago.

I guess I'm just surprised that there are so many apparently ground-down people in a place like this which you would imagine would be primarily populated with people in the software industry.