I would like to add something.

I still have something to say. Some HR personnel, managers, colleagues, and senior engineers, whenever they hear someone ask for normal working hours, can only sneer that the person just wants to “coast until retirement.” I just want to say: If an engineer only wanted to “coast until retirement”:

I wouldn’t need to spend my own salary buying the latest books in their original language, read technical articles everywhere, watch technical videos in English from overseas, (1) self-study front-end and back-end frameworks, (2) self-study TDD, (3) self-study refactoring, (3) self-study functional programming, (4) self-study unit testing/Selenium, (5) self-study design patterns, (6) self-study Docker, (7) self-study Pandas/Scikit-Learn, (8) spend time working on side projects on GitHub and writing technical notes, or (9) practice kata/dojo.

None of these were used in my previous work. No one forced me to learn these skills, but I believe that learning them can help me perform better at work. Perhaps when the time is right, I can discuss with my manager how to apply them at work and improve software development.

But all you do is spread rumors that I leave work at six every evening, focusing only on these superficial things. Even if you stay at the company until seven or eight every day, the code readability is still very poor in every code review. Whenever someone takes leave, everything immediately falls apart; when bugs appear, all the engineers have to gather in a meeting room and “commune with the spirits,” guessing what your code is actually supposed to do.

Before saying that I only want to coast until retirement, please first reflect on whether you have continued to improve yourselves. Then, whenever new technologies or packages need to be used, you cannot even understand the English documentation and need someone else to translate or explain it for you. After that, you start pushing the work away, saying that you are very busy and telling me to do it.

So apparently, the kind of software engineer society wants is someone who stays in the office until very late every day and goes around complaining to everyone about how busy they are—that is what counts as not coasting until retirement.