I do not work in Hawthorne, and the work environments are very different between headquarters and the other sites.
Hours are always long. On top of the already super tight deadlines, a lot of added work gets input after the fact, but the same deadline is expected to be held. We advertise our hours to hopefuls and new hires as 60 hours a week is a regular week (6 x 10 hr days). For salaried employees, this gets exceeded almost always.
I have always felt that people get looked down on for not wanting to work 60-80 hours a week, and that sometimes we end up doing it out of peer pressure.
Recently we were able to increase the probability of getting one day off per weekend due to increased staffing. Although this is a step in the right direction, you do not 100% know if you get it off, and if so, what day you get off until mid week at absolute best. This makes it extremely difficult to plan for things outside of work without using your vacation days.
The case for 90+% of the company is that everyone is all there to achieve a common goal, so they work together and the work environment is friendly and fun. My area and group I have always felt it to be a more hostile environment where people were more concerned with their own personal gain rather than achieving a common goal.
Job descriptions are somewhat vague. This makes it extremely hard to determine what your responsibilities are, and in turn allows one to possibly be given more work than they have bandwidth for and basically we just have to deal with it. This also sucks at review time, because you could get a review that was lower than you thought but its because they were reviewing your job based on 100% different criteria than you thought you were being judged on.
