MBA holders is a bad example since many of them happily work many hours of overtime, so I am pretty sure that they work more hours than software engineers even if you include the time it takes to study for interviews.
> It turns out that the median number of hours racked up by an MBA in his or her first year of employment is a whopping 54 hours a week
I am confused. Why do you think software engineers stop working as much as MBAs when they land a job? That's when they have to start studying even more beside working.
54 sounds about average for an engineer anyway. In Germany for example it's not rare to have 9 hour working days, with 30 to 60 minute lunch breaks in between. If it's so then basically one week comes to about 45 hours / week. If you study 2 hours a day, read books or read the news, follow trends, watch recordings of past conferences, etc which are pretty standard things that you are supposed to do on your job then it easily comes to 54 hours / week. So that's not high at all.
Or maybe you put that time into raising your family, or otherwise being a well-rounded individual. It’s easy to do, if one assumes that the employer pays for the time required to keep an employee’s skills current.
> It turns out that the median number of hours racked up by an MBA in his or her first year of employment is a whopping 54 hours a week
https://www.forbes.com/sites/poetsandquants/2018/03/06/the-6...