From past experience I would LOVE to see some managerial acknowledgement of their fuckups that lead to crunch time. Praise is temporary, but if no changes are introduced from the other end of the work pipeline people will get crushed.
I'm kind of in a weird in-between role. Usually when crunch time happens we were well aware that the deadlines were aggressive or the feature was going to be a major PITA to implement and brought that up but executives pull ranked and basically said I don't care figure it out. We're all kind of defenseless honestly, it's just some of us are lucky enough where we're not directly responsible for creating the actual product.
The executives might not care right now, but when the peons who do the actual crunch time leave, they'll end up with newcomers with no one to train them. Crunch time should be for real emergencies only.
When I learned that my all-weekender overtime was only to keep an internal deadline, I started look for a new position immediately.
