I used to work as a test engineer at a fairly large software company. Every year, the development team got larger and larger, but upper management refused to allow the testing team to grow accordingly. As a result, our workload got larger and larger as the years went by. In my final year, the daily schedule was insane, with team members routinely putting in 50+ hour work weeks (salaried jobs with no overtime pay whatsoever).
Our team manager was, for lack of a better word, a coward. He refused to push back against upper management's insane demands on our team. Every year during my annual review, I'd tell the team manager that we needed more people, more server equipment to increase testing bandwidth, etc. And every single time, he'd get irritated at me, and tell me that we just needed to work harder with what we had.
The team manager had successfully bullied several members of my team (H-1B's whom he essentially had the power of life/death over) into working on weekends and late into the evenings on weekdays (with no overtime pay whatsoever). But I refused to go along with his ridiculous demands.
During my final annual review in my last year at the company, I received a “poor” rating. Which was rather puzzling to me as my work performance was the same as it had been the prior years (all prior years my rating was either “average” or “good”). It was clearly bullshit, and the team manager was trying to use a BS “poor” rating as a passive-aggressive way to pressure me into working the same weekend/evening hours as the H-1B's on the team.
During that meeting, the team manager angrily said to me, “I answer my emails at midnight on weekends and I don't see why you can't do so as well!”
That was the moment when I decided that I needed to get the hell out of there. I stayed on for a few more months, and then gave my two weeks notice.