There is work life balance. In SF, in particular, some companies treat their tech work force like newborn puppies. Other areas of the country as well treat their engineers like they are unicorns.

If there is a move towards outsourcing it's that the effort of US programmers is lower than abroad and the costs are much higher (I'm not talking about quality, obv)

If you're being mistreated at work, I recommend looking for another employment. Last I checked there was a surplus of 80K programming jobs in the US per year.

This isn't representative of my personal experience nor my peer/friend groups' in tech. Anecdata: of the ~5 senior engineer friends I have at large tech companies only one of them consistently works much more than 35 hours a week.

I was actually really heartened to see this article on HN because slow mornings have been life changing for me. Spending 3 quiet hours in the morning on my own pursuits has been wildly mood elevating. Plus, I usually use one of those hours to read about tech (although HN is banned from my morning hours). Five hours of study a week is easily ~240 hours of spaced repetition even if you miss a few weeks, and I would bet good money that it's more studying than the vast majority of my coworkers.

Balance is thriving in SF/SV from what I can see.

I've been in the tech industry working for tech companies for a decade and have never regularly worked more than 40 hours per week. I do not check work email outside of business hours and I do not have email or chat alerts on my phone. I set the expectation with all of my coworkers that they can call me on the phone if there's an emergency outside of normal hours and I'll try to help, but that type of thing should always be handled by our on-call engineer first. If you're speaking from personal experience, you should re-evaluate your employer and how you approach your work life.

I can't say I've ever had that sweet of a deal (perhaps a byproduct of working at smaller startups), but what you describe is much more in line with my experiences than the nightmare described in comment you responded to.

This. The only times that I've worked more than 40 hours a week is during an emergence or when working for my own company.

This depends enormously on where you're working and what you're optimizing for. "Deceiving yourself" is far too strong: people can easily tell how many hours they're working and whether they're expected to be continuously available.

I have two small kids, so it's important to me that I have a lot of time outside of work. Typically I'm up at 7am, get them ready, bring them to school, get to work ~8:30, leave work ~4:50, kids down ~8:30, bed ~10. I rarely check email outside of work or work in the evenings (only when there's something I'm working on that I'm super excited about) and there's no pressure at all to work more hours than this. I'm not on call.

Not all tech jobs are like this, and I'm lucky I've found one that is a good fit for me, but work-life balance is totally possible.

This article isn’t about working in the tech industry

I understand but the whole start off your day slow, be dainty in the morning, etc does not fly well in IT industry I have seen.

People seem to rush to work, I would estimate majority either just grab some breakfast on the way or skip it and work per employee has increased a lot with added pressure to train/keep up to date for last 10 years.

How would anyone at work know if you woke up earlier and enjoyed a slow morning?