Crunch time is fine when its uncommon and unforseen. Otherwise it is a manag3ment failure. Perhaps its deliberate failure to respect peoples personal life, but that's still a failure. I've worked plenty of places where crunch time is uncommon or nonexistent. It doesn't have to be that way.
If staff are consistently having to work overtime to hit targets then there's either:
- A problem with the staff - there's either not enough of them or they haven't the skills to do what is required
or
- A problem with the management.
I've never worked in a role where incompetent people were hired and couldn't get what needed to be done done, but I've worked under plenty of incompetent management.
Alternative 3: a problem with the law. I know 'Murica loves it's free market, dog eat dog, each man for himself ideal. But to us Europeans it looks like many US companies are no better than slave drivers. No regulation, no life for employees. On the other hand, US corps can compete with the Chinese and Koreans, there are no tech giants in well regulated European countries (are there?) because after 3 or 4 in the afternoon we all go home to our children.
Not really true, Ireland has a large concentration of 'tech giants'. They may be setting up because of tax regulations but they pretty much all have sizeable engineering workforces in Ireland. Google Ireland for example employs more than 2,500 people.
If you instead mean homegrown tech giants then you have a definite point. The only European giants I can think of are Telefonica, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, Nokia and SAP. It would be interesting to see the research on if the reason for that has much to do with the horrible work expectations in the US.
There are quite a lot of studies that examine the difference between 'crunch mode' and 40hr type weeks. I've read that crunch beyond about 3 weeks results in less work being done per week than a 40hr week, and two months of crunch mode results in being behind where two months of 5day/40hr weeks would have got you. It also increases the risk of product failure.
Basically, if you believe that hitting a deadline is worth having overall less productivity for, you can reasonably crunch for 2 weeks, and have the third week as an acknowledged low productivity week, and it might be worth it. Anything much beyond that is counter-productive on pretty much all axes and a strong sign that management is incompetent.
Long crunch times are either a symptom of longterm planning failures (not hired enough people), or it's a deliberate and premeditated attempt to abuse people for cheap labour (why have 10 people do the work when 6 overworked people can do the same job?).
They can't. As the comment before yours pointed out: after about three weeks, those six overworked people are so inefficient that they are getting less done than six people would working regular hours.
Long crunch times (more than two or three weeks) are strong evidence of deliberately abusive management, who are willing to lower productivity below what it would be with a 40-hour work week for the sake of their egos.
