serpantino: Of course this treatment of staff is common in the industry but the grass always looks greener on the other side.
No, this treatment of staff is not common. Because everybody knows (or should know) that when you extend a 40h week to 50h or even 60h, after as little as 2-3 weeks your productivity drops by 20%. After 4-5 weeks it drops by 40% and finally after less than 2 months stabilizes around 60% reduced productivity. So you end up with only 40% of your time being used effectively, almost cutting your output in half.
It may sound paradoxal, but even though you work more, you achieve less and development actually takes longer.
Working overtime is proven to be beneficial only for certain jobs and/or short sprints, not for running a marathon.
And what is worse, after as little as 6 months, your sick days begin to go up as people start to burn out.
Burn-out causes permanent psychological damage. It irrevocably changes your brain chemistry and (best case scenario) results in several months of sick leave. In some cases, people need years to recover or never fully recover at all, leading to a permanent disability. And no job, literally none, is worth risking permanent disability at the age of thirty-five or less.
I've been leading dev-teams for 2 decades and met no professional who wasn't aware of this and many more caveats. Those are classic project management anti-patterns that have entire books written about how to detect and avoid them. The only way to screw this up as a boss is to deliberately ignore the advice of your own tech people.
As a team lead, what you care about is reliability in your projected velocity AKA productivity. I don't care about 8 or even 10 extra hours of work, because work hours != productivity. What I care about is that I can be certain, all my developers show up on Monday, refreshed and able to do their job, so that I got all the resources I planned for at my disposal. What I don't want is to not be sure how many of my devs will be so overworked that they either can't show up at all or are falling asleep in front of their keyboard.