I agree w/ Rob and Peter. I will point out though, that at the company where I was using these interview questions, we were a small company with an even smaller development staff. I tried to be up-front with the people that we hired that it was very likely that they would be working more than 9-5 and that they needed to be OK with that working here. We were very flexible about the particular hours that were worked, but the deadlines were often not controllable by the development team (ugh), and thus created less-than-desirable time requirements. I like to think we had a really good environment with interesting work (and adequate compensation if you count the thousands of now worthless stock options ), but I didn't want to mislead people about the expectations. In my old and wise age now , I'm in a bigger company where it's almost always 9-5, but even here there are days when I have to stay long (software has a way of doing that as the deadline looms near).