I've heard about NASA's Flight Software teams being very strict on 9-5 work hours, with lots of code review and tests. I was under the impression this wasn't as strict with the competition from SpaceX and Blue Origin now that we aren't sending people to space on our (USA) own rockets. Is my impression incorrect?
SpaceX (or rather, Elon Musk) is famous for pushing their developers hard. Elon sent his team to live on a remote island in the Pacific [1] where they were asked to stay until they could (literally!) launch.
I don't work in the manned space part of NASA and the software I deal with isn't critical, so I can't say. Most of what I know about Flight software development comes from co-workers who've done that work. They speak of getting written permission to swap two lines of code. That sort of thing. I think it would be cool to have code I wrote running on Mars, but I don't know if I could cope with that development environment.
I have some friends on the mechanical engineering side of things at SpaceX and can definitely say that 9-5 work hours don't even seem to be a suggestion. It likely varies team to team though.
