Feeling the pressure: Is the culture just 'burn and churn' now?

I felt the exact same way before I finally left. It stopped being about building quality features or supporting our clients and shifted entirely toward hitting arbitrary, aggressive metrics to appease the Street. When the focus moves to headcount reduction rather than growth, the talent starts looking for the exit immediately. You aren't imagining the decline; the culture shifted hard recently, and it's exhausting to operate in a place where your job security feels like a toss-up based on the latest quarterly report. Start updating your resume now, because morale rarely recovers once it hits that basement level.

That sounds incredibly draining, and honestly, you aren't alone in noticing that shift. Management seems to have traded our long-term engineering health for short-term visual gains, and it shows in every single sprint. The constant anxiety over the next round of cuts makes it impossible to do your best work, let alone feel any loyalty to the firm. When engineering energy is spent watching your back instead of shipping clean code, the entire ship is eventually going to drift off course. If your gut says the environment is toxic, trust it. Plenty of other places prioritize stability over these aggressive, churn-heavy metrics.