"If you’re not being billed for hours, why wouldn’t you keep expanding your workers’ obligations until the cracks appear?" I'm amazed by the sibling comments "

"If you’re not being billed for hours, why wouldn’t you keep expanding your workers’ obligations until the cracks appear?" I'm amazed by the sibling comments "benefit of the doubt" view even with the hindsight of the game industry, among others, that uses this fact systematically. There's obviously skewed incentives to over-scope when the crunches are culturally normalized together with costs offloaded to the employees since there's no OT pay. The incentives to the individual manager is obvious too. No costs to report for their own incompetence, instead their feature list is completed - and maybe their bonus or promotion goal reached. Where I live this no overtime pay scheme is usually compensated by an extra vacation week per year. Like clockwork however - every single year - this credit is collected through overtime multiple times over. This will be repeated as long as they can get away with it because there's simply so much money to make from it.