In days of yore they had a mechanism so that if an employer ever let it come to that, there would be financial repercussions.

I believe they called it "time and a half."

Point being, no amount of money can replace time spent off work with your family. What are you going to do, pay your spouse and children as an alternative to actually eating dinner with them? Only replacement time can make up for that sacrifice.

Actually my point was, that rather than an absolute ("no amount of time can replace time spent off work with family"), there was a market mechanism that did a pretty good job of letting individual employees/employers manage the tradeoffs between work and non-work. Somehow (Republicans) that mechanism became deprecated, and has been replaced by conflict and bullshit.

Except when you take flex time out of the working day, it doesn't come at dinnertime, it comes when your spouse is still at work and your kids are still at school or maybe at their afterschool thing.

And also I agree to work overtime near deadlines because my employer lets me super flexible work time when there's not much work. So it's a tradeoff.

Of course, if your employer doesn't compensate with something, you're getting screwed. But that's true for developers, waiters, clerks, everybody, it's not something specific of our kind.

Based on the comments and complains I heard and read online (in other words: it's only my wild theory) what it seems specific of programmers is the willingness to comply, without trying to negotiate. Maybie it's because the ideal is passionate effort instead of detached profesionalism, or maybie it's because programmers are just a 'quiet bunch'.

It's also the lack of unionization.

I believe the lack of unionization is an effect of what I wrote.