[Tade0]

As someone from Poland I have my own suspicions on how all this came to pass - it's a reflection of the local work/management culture, one aspect of which is overpromising and sacrificing work-life balance to deliver - what's unique here that it's present on every level of responsibility.

That idea with working Saturdays for weeks on end is just one example.

I remember my mother, an artisan working in a theatre, having essentially a full month or two of those before each opening night.

My father, an engineer with a decent salary, would still pick up additional work and spend entire evenings on it. Hell, the first PC in our family was bought specifically for this purpose.

All this wasn't perceived as weird or unusual, because during communism working Saturdays were the norm. The parents of my friends would also be mostly absent, making the most of the rapid economic growth of the 90s. Unemployment was also fairly high, so it's not like they had much of a choice in the matter.

This environment created a management culture that either doesn't feel the need to improve and innovate(because you can always leverage the low cost of employment or put pressure on workers) or doesn't even know how to do that, so it experiments a lot - with mixed results.