Crunch mode only works for when the finish line is in sight.

Instead of a 40 hour week, you find out you are within 50 hours of the goal. So you ask the team to come in for 60 hours that week, get 50 effective hours, and give everyone time off the week after to recover.

That's not what happens once you have the crunch mode button installed, though.

I used to live with a banker. He'd sit at the office all day, and at about 6pm his boss would come back from meetings, and demand slides be ready for the next morning. So the little bankers would be sitting in the office from about 9am to midnight. This went on for years. Same with weekends and presumed nights off: someone would see it fit to phone the analysts on their night off to have them correct the font on a slide deck.

Ultimately, this wears down everyone. People get stressed when there's no end in sight. The bad kind of stress that makes you lose your hair and your sanity.

I have this experience working in academia too. Closer to paper submission, all the coauthors work longer days. Emails at midnight and sometimes even Zoom calls at ungodly hours are not unheard of. But once the paper is submitted, usually things slow down.

The people who don't slow down, usually end up burned out quickly. Their research suffers and it shows up in the quality of their work. Then the papers get rejected more often, which puts them more under pressure. It becomes a vicious cycle.

> The bad kind of stress that makes you lose your hair and your sanity.

And, ultimately, your life. I‘d assume that no company is worth dying for, blatantly speaking. Especially so, if it’s not your own.