> but it quickly turned into an excuse to expect everyone to be available on demand, 16 hours per day, 7 days per week.
If that happens, you have bad leadership. At the very least, your manager should be protecting you from this. If I get off hours emails with urgent requests, I usually just reply to my manager (with CCs intact) and say "I'm willing to do this, but I would like to be compensated 2 working hours for every hour that I work on this, because this is supposed to be my weekend and I am going to have to cancel my plans to do this. Do you want to go ahead under that arrangement?"
I like it because it's not confrontational, it just reminds them that you are a person with your own things going on. It also puts the ball in their court. If they want to come back and say "no, you must do this, and you get no compensation", that sends a very clear message, and you can do with that what you want. Whatever you do, you probably don't want to be at that company any longer than you have to at that point.
> I firmly believe that good management can overcome these issues, but it must come from the top. Not only that, but managers who abuse the system must be visibly removed from the company for doing so. Unless there are consequences for abusing the flexibility of your employees to extract more work, some percentage of managers will take advantage of the system to get ahead.
Personally, I don't think that there's a faction to explicitly blame. I think that overdrive comes from basically playing a game of telephone. VP tells director that we're not doing great on metric X. Director looks and decides that it's important for these 3 teams to work on Y features to help with metric X. Director tells managers that we must improve metric X (but won't say that really he wants to look good to his manager). Managers then tell employees that it's life or death these features ship, and the director, managers, and ICs all end up working overtime. Feel free to add more layers of distortion to match your place in the org chart. The VP works overtime too, but that's basically par for the course.
The gist is, each employee wants to do well. Even if it's not strictly to impress their manager, I don't think anyone wants to wake up and say "I'm gonna do a really mediocre job today". So when they communicate that importance to the tier below them, they increment the importance by a little bit. Tall org charts can cause this, as can high-stress environments where everyone multiplies the importance instead of incrementing it.