So much wasted potential - Software Engineer Benefitfocus Employee Review

It's hard to say where Benefitfocus went wrong. I started there 6 years ago, and at the time it was a genuinely nice place to work. During the four years I put in there, it turned into a very, very different company. By the time I left, I was being worked like a dog with little to no recognition. To put that in more quantifiable terms, I was once reprimanded for putting in an (only) 40 hour work week, which was preceded by an 80 hour week and two back-to-back 100+ hour weeks. In other words, I got in trouble for not working enough after putting in a 320 hour month. To be fair, those hours weren't representative of the norm (I was averaging more like 60-70), but how I was treated was very representative. Unfortunately, my experience was hardly unique. Engineers are hired on salary, and there is a strong pattern of squeezing every possible ounce of unpaid overtime out of them. It's not that the leadership is evil. My understanding was that the sales teams had been told to stop over-promising, but at the end of the day, grand new features were handed down to developers with deadlines originating from unknown sources. And, as I had been so often reminded, "Benefitfocus does not miss deadlines." Anyway, as awful as they were, the hours aren't why I finally chose to leave. Archaic technology decisions are handed down from above, the organizational hierarchy translates into ludicrous bureaucracy, and corporate politics trumps all else. In the face of a large refactor, I finally made one ultimatum: as the lead developer, I needed the freedom to make my own technology choices. In response I was offered an embarrassingly large pay increase (over 50%!) and a fancy title. Career stagnation appears in many more meaningful ways than salary, so that was the final straw for me.