" What happens with crunch time? "

Managers actually plan, and stop relying on it. Crunch time is not something that should exist, as it's just punishing employees for the inability of management to make a sane schedule.

The majority of the time, totally agree with you. But the real world has certain dates that matter, and something things go wrong. Someone gets sick. Someone gets pregnant (I guess something might have gone right rather than wrong here, but you get the point). A server goes down. Shit happens. There's only so much buffer time that's practical to allocate. And black Friday doesn't move.

Require "crunch time" to be fairly compensated as it should be (overtime rate) and see how quickly and suddenly crunch time is not needed anymore.

At most companies "crunch time" is just a label stuck on "squeezing salaried employees for every last drop of juice".

When there's no penalty on the company for needing crunch time, suddenly they find themselves needing a lot of it.

You can easily see how nonsensical all of this corporate garbage is by hypothetically flipping it around to the benefit of employees and think about how they would react instead.

Hey boss it's "quiet time" can I go home an hour early for 2 weeks? No ... DING DING!

So don't expect it to be ok to ask me to stay an hour late because it's "crunch time".

Same thing applies to "as long as shit gets done". They always adjust that so that somehow the amount of shit that is expected to get done is more than you can manage in a day. Never the other way around.

No company says "hey enough shit got done for today and it's 3PM so go home and see you tomorrow". No in that case you keep working and get more shit done.

Let's not dress it up, it's all corporate psychological warfare.

Your post reminds me of just how spoiled I am, and I understand the problem with my understanding of the situation might be exactly that. I totally worked for companies that match what you describe.

My current employer though? If we had crunch time and then told my boss I was gonna go home an hour early and do 4 days a week for the next 2 weeks to make up for it? No brainer, they'll say yes. It's also not that uncommon for managers to send people home if they shipped a lot of stuff that day.

I'm a manager myself, and I frequently had to have the talk with my reports to tone it down. The last thing I want is burnt out employees. I've actively told some to calm down and work less.

Then start earlier. I have no sympathy whatsoever for managers that push crunch on their employees. If the date doesn't get met, that's entirely on management.

Your working hours may be fluid, but the workload can't be arbitrary; when you say "as long as shit gets done", someone must have an idea of how much shit you should be able to get done in a regular week. So it's just a case of reducing that expectation by 20%.

I'll be honest, while I've worked at companies that were pretty darn good at estimation, I've never worked somewhere where people were able to guess within a 20% error margin how long arbitrary tasks should take. Especially since any given task has a potentially infinite amount of solutions, and solution picks depend on time constraints. If you constrain that time by an extra 20%, it might just be that a weaker solution ends up picked...and without doing the work myself, I can't always easily tell if the right one was picked or not and have to just trust that the person did things right.

Which for an individual totally works and solves the problem. Just trust. Unfortunately people also like fairness in pay and compensation...and that start making things tricky.