Equal pay for equal work. If I am forced to work 80 hours a week, I except to at least get a bonus check for it. Not nothing but paid for 40 hours. If I get 39 hours a week due to a sickness or something, I catch unholy heck for it, despite me making the extra hour or hours up the next week for it. Yet they don't even bat an eyebrow at the 50, 60, and 80 hours I do on other weeks for them.
Strech goals? More like mismanagement over how long a job should actually take to get done. Managers are always underbidding the hours, and then forcing us to work extra hours to make up for their mistakes. So if they say something should take two weeks to get done, and then they see that it really should have been two months, they force us to work 60 to 80 hours a week in two weeks to get it done. The Pyramid Builders in Egypt had a system like this with whips, you know.
At-Will which only goes to show that we have the best government that money can buy.
Management always passed down the blame, I've yet to see any manager take responsibility for their own blunders. Better to blame a peon or two and fire them, than admit to making a mistake. IT Workers have become whipping boys/girls.
I bet you like doing Data Entry, or moving computers around, or doing QA work, or being forced to do anything but your own job, and then get told that your own job is not getting done, right? That is a trick they use to bring down your productivity in your job description to make it look like you aren't being productive. I am not talking about sweeping floors or scrubbing toliets, but don't give management any ideas.
I am not talking about a wonderful life, just a decent one where I get the respect I should get, and I get a job were I am treated fairly. Not those IT Jobs where management considers IT workers to be "A dime a dozen" and can fire many on the spot for no reason at all.