If you're not hitting crunch at all, it's because the product you're working on has no deadlines, it by nature can always be pushed back a release cycle. Deadlines mean crunch, because deadlines mean something is going to go wrong inside the time window that you said nobody can do anything wrong anymore, and it takes more time to fix than ordinary work days left until launch. This always happens with everything. It happens to extreme degrees with overambitious products managed by idiots who refuse to cut any features, but it even happens in enterprise software where the main thing happening in the next update is changing typefaces and making button-clicks more responsive.
You know what's another form of crunch? Cramming for exams or rushing to turn in papers when you're in college. Having to hurry like a motherfucker to finish an objective before a deadline arrives, for whatever reason, is a completely natural thing. Doubly so when your work depends on other people's work.
Hell, I'm a pretty organized person and I always try to finish my assignments ahead of schedule, but I lost count of the times a project at work landed on my desk with only two days to spare, or a project got delayed even though it left my desk with
plenty of time before the deadline, because
someone else along the line got bogged down. And I say it without any malice towards my coworkers, most of the time it's not incompetence. Shit just happens. Ideas fall apart halfway through implementation, supplies run out, important people get sick or have accidents,
clients change their minds... it all results in crunch at the end of the day.
Sure, if a company employs crunch to an
unreasonable degree, that's definitely bad. If the team is always crunching for some reason or another, that's bad and it will result in employee churn (which inevitably leads to a worse product). But how much is "unreasonable" is a subjective judgment. You can't just bleat "baa baa crunch baaaaad" like it's some kind of universal axiom. Because there's really no good solution for it: crunch
will happen for a myriad reasons, so you can't just
prevent it from happening. Trying to remedy it also has its own share of problems, because either you end up with staff bloat (not good for any company), or you open the can of worms that is temporary/contractor work and the mire of "toxic" situations you get in that field.
Like everything else, this requires liberal application of that n-word terminally woke people like Jim hate so much: nuance. Banging your drum to the same tired song regardless of the context will get your argument ignored at best, and actively rejected at worst.
