they’d say hours were normal but they might need extra hours during “crunch time”,

I always had this arrangement at the companies I worked for, except the “normal hours” were actually me doing next to nothing, and the “crunch time” was me genuinely busting my ass for a few weeks nearly every waking hour to get the software finished and out the door. It was nothing more than an extension of how I handled college rather than some arrangement that the companies intentionally offered. Management was always just so utterly fucking clueless about anything related to the technical side of software development that it was easy to fool them into thinking that my way of doing things was just normal for the field.