Important questions are: do you get paid overtime? Are there bonuses and/or promotions and/or time off later? Does management recognize the situation? Do you enjoy this company or the work or your co-workers when it’s not running late?

Is the deadline moveable in time or scope? Some deadlines are pretty firm and slipping will result in costing the company a lot of money.

If you stay, you should take notes on how management reacts, what steps they take to improve. Offering the right kind of constructive help to improve it is an opportunity to step into management if you want it. You know a lot more than I do about your situation, but I wouldn’t necessarily assume that meetings were the cause of overtime. Sometimes despite many meetings, lack of enough planning is still the problem. Or maybe the issue is that decisions were not being made in the meetings.

To answer the question, I’ve been in 5 companies that handled this 5 different ways:

- One company (film) that had paid overtime for 2-3 months at the end of every 18 month project. The overtime pay was 1.5x, but some accounting shenanigans made it so overtime pay didn’t kick in until 5 or 10 hours in, so it tended to work out more like 1.3x. Overtime was managed quite well IMO, but wasn’t seen as a problem. Post-project meetings would reflect on how to buffer production from changes in the story or examine accidents and discuss how to keep them from happening. The crunch times over several films slowly went down because management was improving. My base hours were 50/wk, crunch time hours were ~60-70. I did 80 once for a month when a project went off the rails. Management recognized it and this contributed to closing the division and moving everyone.

- Another company (games) had unpaid overtime for 4-6 months at the end of every 18 month project. Free dinner though! Discretionary bonuses tended to go toward people who put in more effort, though it was far from fair. Post-project meetings were slightly more about letting people vent than fixing the planning process, and would tend to reiterate the message that crunch time is inevitable. My base hours were 40-50/wk, crunch hours ramped from 50 to 80, peaking at 90 once or twice. BTW 80 for any real stretch is unlivable.

- When I ran my own startup, my overtime was unpaid and constant, never ending. ;) I probably worked 80-90 hours/wk, but it was way more flexible and much easier to do than when working for someone else’s company.

- When I worked for a web company that used continuous integration and delivery in 2 week sprints there was virtually no overtime, and we would punt features into the next sprint whenever they fell behind or grew in scope. There was a constant mild healthy pressure to deliver, but people clocked out at 5pm more consistently than anywhere else I’ve ever worked.

- At my current job, a hardware company, there is no official overtime or tracking of time at all, including “unlimited” vacation (which is kinda nice but I think tends to make me take less vacation than if I had a quota). Our software delivery is every 3-6 months, hardware projects every ~2 years. I tend to work more than 40 hours a week, and I put in extra hours above that when I want to do a little extra or do a good job on something, or I’m researching something I’m interested in. Compensation is good and my manager doesn’t think of jobs in terms of hours, he and I make sure I’m bringing value over the years.