I'm going to start searching for a new job next month. I was let go from my current one because my co-workers were putting in 60~80 hours per week and I was only putting in 40 (plus one 13 hour weekend, which we were paid for. I refused to work the next Sunday and was let go two days later. We were salary exempt; no overtime).

When interviewing this fall, I do intend to list a 40 hour work week as something I'm looking for, but what do I say about my current employment status?

This has only happened once in the past; years ago. I simply said "My contract ended" at the time, and I got a job really quickly so it wasn't an issue.

When a potential employer asks, do I say I was let go because I couldn't keep up with the two months of 60~80 hour work weeks, or do I simply say, "My contract ended." (A little bet of a stretch since I was an FTE, but a work agreement is technically a contract and it technically did end).

Me: here is my idea with the code. Does it follow what you had in mind?
Dev lead : this is good...really good but if you could take everything you have here and make it a reusable module that would be great!
Me: so it is or isn't what you had in mind?
Dev lead :: it is but I need you to change it all.
Me....FML

[Blue pill]
stay in my current workplace [approaching the 10yrs mark], with an agreed salary and seniority raise, with a high probability of losing my current project [which is really fun!] in Feb next year and having to switch to another one, but keep all the benefits

[Red pill]
switch full-time to contracting with a potential to reap big bucks [x2-x4] and be free to juggle as many clients as I like, dictate my terms, become a shareholder, but lose all that warm and cozy certainty guaranteed by my current employer

Sounds like brainfuck...

Seriously corp....who the hell thought is was going to be a good idea to try and cram together a Microsoft product with os....wtf. typescript has NO business being used with REACT. Ummm if ts doesn't know what push() is we are all f'ed

So yeah I'm currently working with a small team on a project that will save our company around 1000 FTE (literally ~1000 people) costs per year.

But we forgot to do branches in our gitlab project... And now I needed to resolve a merge conflict on a PyQT UI file. Fuck my morning I need more coffee!

So basically it started with my internship at a very reputed and big company. I was one of three guys selected for same from my college out of 750 possible candidates and also there was a possibility of conversion of internship to the full time employment. I was super excited about it but I was also aware of drawbacks if I wasn't able to convert my internship to FTE. And the same thing happened. I couldnt get the job as there wasnt no vacancies there and I couldnt do well in campus placements as I was busy writing code for the company and didnt have enough time to prepare for campus placements. However, one very reputed campany offered me internship which I accepted as I didnt have better options at that point of time. Today was my first day at company and I got to know that they wont convert internships to FTE as their company dont have enough vacancies. Now, because I cracked some of most difficult interviews, I am left with internship with worse stipend and no possiblity of getting job in the same. This has been a real good year really.

Me: I spent some time cleaning up code because our server was crashing every time I called this api I needed for the new feature we are building this sprint.
Scrum master: why are you working on things that were not planned in this sprint
Me: ....