It's a real thing. When I interned in the Bills scouting department, I was offered to come on as a paid scout. But the hours of the paid scouts who worked in the building were 5am to 8pm, and they all lived in a small apartment. Two in bunk beds in one room, two in beds in another, and the 5th on a pull-out couch. They had pizza every night for dinner. And they rarely had a day off, working almost every weekend and some holidays.
We see the top people (head coach, GM, coordinators, etc) and think that life is grand. But there's an army of scouts and coaches behind them. The Bills had five younger scouts in their at-home scouting department in 1994-95 who did nothing but prepare the sent in reports, adjust boards, review compatibility rankings, run mock drafts, compile prospect mean-median-range stats, etc. Those guys were looking at a decade of grinding before the Bills would put them on the road as scout.
Coaching was not much different. Same type of hours and same type of grind.