Unfortunately, more and more companies are full of slave drivers

With the economy downturn, more and more engineers are losing their jobs or job security. A lot of crappy companies are taking advantage of this situation and screwing their employees. Especially for new employees, the bar for them are being raised higher and higher. I ever talked with a manager about the probation period. I thought the company normally would give a new employee roughly three months for him/her to pick up the speed (I mean, for a decent company and relatively complicated projects). The manager stared at me for a couple of seconds thinking I was an alien. He never thought the new employee should take that much time to fit in... Less training, steep learning curve, they finally will end up with crappy software/hardware products. And sure enough, all those jobs sooner or later will be outsourced to India/China since overthere the labor is cheaper.