* I found that the amount of work put on you scales faster than your own productivity does. Early on I felt mildly overwhelmed mostly due to a lack of experience, but even as I learned and began to work much quicker, I was given more projects, required to learn new tools, languages, or software, more project management responsibility, and more responsibility to develop new hires (coming in frequently due to turnover) or organize tech talks or reading groups.
* By the time I left, I had asked around, and only one person (a manager) was happy with their work-life balance. I worked here for a little under 3 years, and only 2 of maybe 20 original team members were still around by the end. This turnover is both a symptom and cause of burnout as merely by sticking with a team for more than a year, you're likely to become the only person to know intricate details of a few systems, and so become responsible for most of its management on top of whatever other work you're assigned, which then leads to burnout, which leads to turnover, and suddenly now some other poor person is in charge of the system
* On my team tech debt piled up dramatically. Within two years, we went from owning just one system to more than ten. On call rotations became so hectic that most of the time was spent putting out fires rather than working on addressing root causes. Frequent shifts in team structure, and transitions of ownership of systems also meant constantly having to learn new systems on the fly, and being responsible for decisions made by other teams. However management rarely made time for more than one major project to address operational burden per year, instead prioritizing development of new systems and features, which only further added to issues
