I also have some experience working in Germany and I feel you are right with the hours but that's not the point. Even if everybody wants you to work just 40 hours people still have unreasonably high demands because they don't understand the complexity of the situation they are in (coworkers, bosses, customers all the same). So you still need to find ways to satisfy people without always doing exactly what they have asked for.
That's just the nature of work though. You'll find that even general contractors do a great deal of pushing back on scope during a project in order to make sure things come in on both cash and time budgets. The only difference is we work in the virtual space which tends to disconnect people from the fact that things still take time.
Yeah, that's what I was pointing out in another comment directly responding to the topic. That's just how work is, or better how life is. You can complain about it or you find a way to handle it. It's not about the 80-hour week but about handling people.
