How common is it in tech to over-work?

Unfortunately, it's pretty common, especially now in the post-layoffs era 😢

When you are faced with an overly aggressive project, there are 2 core angles of attack:

• Push back (others' control) - This one is tricky and often fails, but if you think you have the social capital, you can try: "What are good strategies to push back when the deadline is not realistic?"
• Get more from your time (self control) - Engineers rarely get the most from their time. Software in particular is a high-leverage area as it's a field where you can easily spend 10 hours achieving 0 impact or 1 hour achieving huge impact. Go through this course: Maximize Your Productivity As A Software Engineer

If you have some room to breathe after this crazy project and projects like these have happened before at your current job, you might want to look outwards (polish your resume/LinkedIn, respond to recruiter messages you have). Work-life balance isn't great right now across the industry, but there are certainly many good companies out there still that offer decent work-life balance.

Sorry to hear that you had to deal with that. I would try to talk to your manager to take some time for yourself after the project ships, so you don't end up burning out.

The scenarios are very common because it's easy to underestimate the time it takes to get tasks done. When you are planning out a project timeline, it's easy to be optimistic about the time it will take to complete tasks. Also, it's easy to not factor in how your time will be spent doing things unrelated to the project, like fixing bugs from another project, attending meetings, onboarding or helping other people.

When you underestimate the amount of work to complete a project, it's common to cut scope and deprioritize certain parts of the project to get the main parts of the project shipped. Then, you can have a follow up plan to add those features later.