Have you considered that perhaps your personal perspective is not exactly representative of large swathes of the industry and that many (if not most) workers do not have the agency and/or leeway to place place themselves in a comparable situation?
I wouldn't be so cut-and-dry with your assertion that the parent post is "lying".
> Have you considered that perhaps your personal perspective is not exactly representative of large swathes of the industry
Yes. HN is place for ALL kinds of people, sometimes they are not even programmers. Many tips are not applicable to everyone here.
In that case, I would heavily disagree with your suggestion. Your "chill" PM is likely actively running interference on your behalf in order to allow you to spend time on such endeavors. It's a great thing when you can have such a partner, but most PMs (in my experience) are not willing to put themselves on the line like that.
yetihehe is not accusing the parent poster of lying, they're telling them to lie. To claim the work will be X (just the feature, perhaps), and then slip in the extra work (tackling tech debt and other issues), and letting the work schedule "slip" (which they can do because they have a "chill PM").
Do most software engineering jobs not have good PM's? Asking since I started my first real software engineering job last year, it doesn't pay the best but the PM is great and very hands off. I wonder if that itself is worth holding onto the job a while.
If you have management that you like working with, and the work is pretty good, yes, that in and of itself is a pretty good reason to stay for a while.