Exempt Employee Catch Twenty Two

If you are an exempt employee (In the US, a salaried, never-get-paid-overtime, white-collar employee), your management often has 2 contradictory views of you.

They expect you to come in at 9am, and stay until 5pm, regardless of the fact that you may have finished all your work earlier (TyrannyOfTheMorningPeople)

But if there is a crisis, they expect you to stay until it is resolved (TyrannyOfTheNightPeople), and then be back at work the next day at 9am.

That doesn't sound like a 'CatchTwentyTwo' to me. It's just one of those unfortunate facts of deadline-oriented work, whether those deadlines are artificial or deadly real.

PoliticalIssuesInTheOffice inflict it, regardless of deadlines or lack thereof. Nontechnicals focus on politics and facetime, and don't understand that programmers focus on creativity, productivity, and quality, which have different requirements.

In theory it's supposed to be more pay and more prestige and more "power" over things. However, practice may sometimes differ and "exempt" is just a way to squeeze more work out of fewer employees.