There's distinctions about working the hours.
If you're working the hours 50+ all year round with no end game in sight (i.e. continued promition, partner track, certain lateral role on the private side, etc) then yes, you are doing it wrong and you're essentially a minimum wage employee with benefits.
If, however, you enjoy what you do and the horus a biproduct of the skills/expertise you need to do to be the top of your job/career/next step, then it is what it is. Generally, in my profession, we work our assess off for 3-4 months, in the "worst" calendar months as a result of regulatory deadlines. There's no way to move the work outside that core period. As a result, we need to work a lot. The flip side is, the expecation to continue that level of work all year round is not present and we revert back to a normal 40 hour workweek unless we have deadlines.
I will happily work this way for the following reasons:
1) I know few things I'm interested in that are secure as my career is
2) Secruity plus the fact I get some sort of raise and bonus every year
3) I have huge levels of flexibilit on how/where I get my work done
4) A lot of lesser paying jobs add more responsbilities to their people and expect them to still get them done no matter what and they wind up working more hours overall than I do on a year round basis and are really supposed to "do more with less." I don't have that pressure.
Again this is what works for me in my career relative to public accounting.
