Expectations != reality. Older project managers and sales make promises before seeing the data or even checking if what they're promising is possible, then projects get escalated because expectations are getting missed.
Escalations do nothing but increase your workload. They just create additional meetings and pull people off of other projects, which will also get escalated later because those people got pulled off.
The workload is ridiculous (on certain apps and newer teams, some are okish). I averaged around 60 hours a week during my time there, with a peak of 120 hours a week. I know you probably went to some high tier engineering school and got a great GPA and 'thrive' off of hard work, but trust me, so did I, and I still almost cracked. It's very different when hugely expensive projects and patients' safety is on the line.
Each time I asked for a week off I had to work 80+ hours the week before; I wasn't actually getting time off, I was just squeezing two weeks worth of work into a single week. They once canceled a vacation the day I was supposed to leave, and another time they didn't approve it until 8pm the night before after I had worked over 100 hours straight to meet an impossible timeline some higher up promised without asking if it was even possible.
They also told me to work over Easter weekend. Didn't ask if I had plans. Didn't ask if I thought I'd go to hell if I didn't observe Easter Sunday (I don't but that's besides the point). Nope, they just told me they'd check in at 10a.m. Sunday to see where I was at.
Constant useless meetings made it impossible to get anything done. 80% of my code was written outside of regular business hours and the average commit time was around 1am. Surprise! That code was riddled in bugs. Maybe give your employees time to actually work and you won't have so many escalations.
I knew people who took PTO to catch up on work to avoid meetings.
The number of times I was told "this might be a nights and weekends type of thing" was infuriating.
They fire people for no reason. A friend of mine worked 80 hours a week on a project to barely push it through on the ridiculous timeline someone else promised and after the successful conclusion of the project they fired him because he "hadn't managed his time effectively."
They might be evil or don't understand the ramifications of their actions: Epic Systems Corp vs. Lewis.
It's really hard to get out when you keep missing interviews to be pulled into some patient safety emergency. Happened multiple times. Even when I asked for a vacation day to do it.
Their technical debt is absurd. A new company with a ton of funding built on a modern tech stack could blow them out of the water.
