> Currently in a situation where our company is asking us to work weekends and extra hours because of a poorly managed project. I'm not going to say you should

> Currently in a situation where our company is asking us to work weekends and extra hours because of a poorly managed project. I'm not going to say you should never work extra hours but 9 times out of 10 this is a HUGE red flag. The company is responsible for managing timelines and setting priorities for what you should work on. I have occasionally put in a few extra hours (I'm talking <10 in a week) in a crunch period but never for more than 1 week in a row. Anything after 1 week starts to become the norm and that's not what I agreed to when I joined. Salarried does not mean they own you. Weekends are 100% out of the question except for production emergencies (and if there is an emergency every weekend then no, there's not, don't be tricked into that BS). The business can decide to move the deadline or cut out some of the features but they can't decide to just get more hours from you for free (or rather they can but don't put up with that shit, find a better job). I have a friend who was in this situation and he hadn't talked about it with anyone until he was nearly at his breaking point. He was telling us (we had met up for drinks) that he was working till 8-9pm if not later almost every day, every week and still feeling like he wasn't getting enough done. He was having regular breakdowns and crying at his desk. Sometimes you are in so deep you don't realize how absurd the requests from your company are and they were guilting him hard about it. This is someone I greatly respect and I would have never expected him to allow himself to be treated this way. We set him straight and told him to set boundaries, only work till 5pm, tell his boss to set the priority but he wouldn't be working overtime. He was in a contracting situation so his actual boss wasn't really involved in what the client was asking him to do but his boss was not a good boss and didn't help him out at all (meaningless platitudes were all he gave, he should have stepped in and set boundaries with the client). He set the boundaries, pulled himself back from the brink of despair, and started looking for a new job. He found one and he is much happier now. Companies will take (and sometimes guilt you into) every hour they can get from you and rarely tell you to work less. Set boundaries and if they balk then start looking (though it sounds like you should start looking immediately no matter what).