Is this normal in software companies? My experience in a fintech company

Long post ahead.

Background -

I’ve been working as a software engineer for the past 2.5 years in a fintech company. It’s a US-based company with some work outsourced to India, and this is my first job. We work with very outdated, legacy technology. Some of the tools we use have no documentation at all (they’re not even present on the internet). We received no training for these tools or technologies.

Since this is my first job, I’m not sure if this is how software companies typically work. Below are some of the issues I’ve faced. Please let me know if these are common everywhere:

• Whenever a change request comes in, it’s assigned directly to us (developers) with no clear requirements. We’re expected to figure out the requirements ourselves. Even the team lead doesn’t help—he just asks us to get it done within the deadline. The most difficult part of the work isn’t coding but literally running around asking people what needs to be done.

• There are no code reviews. Whatever we write goes straight to production if it works in QA. No one checks the code. I’ve seen production code with terrible indentation and random print/log statements like “Hello”, “In line 24”, “TEST”, or even the developer’s name. There was some discussion about introducing code reviews, but nothing ever happened.

• In one project, upper management committed to a 6-month delivery without even clarifying requirements from the client. They didn’t check whether our tech stack supported the requirements. The project obviously escalated, and we were made to work like hell. We had to work for 1.5 months straight (35 days without weekend offs or holidays) without a single rupee of compensation or even a comp-off.

• Now there’s another project going exactly the same way. Indian management wants to prove themselves better than the onshore team, so they’re making everyone (10+ members) work every day without weekends or festival holidays for the last 3 months, and this may continue for another 3 months. Leaves are being rejected because of this.

• The team lead or manager can call us whenever they want. There are no fixed working hours.

• We’re not given access to Teams or Outlook on our personal phones. Whenever a ticket comes in (whether it’s our issue or not), we get paged at random times (midnights, weekends), and we’re expected to look into it. But to even check the issue, we have to open our laptops because we have no access on mobile. I don’t know if this counts as being on call 24/7 without pay.

After about a month of getting out of the escalated project, my manager called me on a weekend to support another project because it got escalated. I agreed and worked 2 hours on Saturday and 5 hours on Sunday. Now he’s again asking me to support another project this weekend because there’s “too much work” for them. What should I do in this situation? I don’t want to work overtime (even if they paid me, which they won’t) because I want to upskill on weekends.

TL;DR: My first job in a fintech company has no requirements, no code reviews, toxic overtime culture, and 24/7 on-call expectations. Management keeps making me work weekends without compensation, and I don’t know how to push back or whether this is normal.