I'm an engineer at one of those big, dying corporations from the 1970s, but has still been struggling along a few decades longer than their ability to innovate would predict.
This is also my first engineering job out of college and I've been working here for a few years. One of the things that made it a really attractive place to work in the first place was how much they appreciated work-life balance. It was all anyone talked about. “You won't get paid as much as you would at other companies in the industry, but you won't have to work as hard or as much!”
That line has just felt like a lie. Do all tech companies tell themselves this? Frequently, people at my work are working 10 hour days, up to 16 hour days. Sure you get a Friday off no questions asked if you want it, but you're working 8 AM to 9 PM Tuesday and Wednesday. Engineers here are working over plane flights, working late into the night, generating tons of work (which in turn makes more work for everyone else, not less, keep this in mind if you're one of those people, if I wake up to 5 emails from you, it didn't matter that you did them on your own time, you have now added more things to MY work day).
It sure doesn't seem like work life balance. Maybe for the handful of people that get away being pretend busy bodies (always in meetings, never actually delivering anything). It seems to explain why people continuously leave the company to work elsewhere that has supposedly worse work-life balance, but pays significantly more.
It feels like I'm going crazy because I keep hearing the work-life balance line over and over and over again, but what is actually happening doesn't look like work life balance at all, it looks like a company taking advantage of the fact that we are salaried employees in a high cost of living area, so they don't have to pay overtime.
Maybe all companies are just exactly like this. Or maybe I just got the shit end of the stick at this one.