When you fly long haul, one thing you'll notice is that crews all roughly stay in the same hotels, go to the same bars and eat in the same restaurants.
Once in a while I meet EK pilots and most of them do not make a happy impression on me. Granted that these EK pilots that I meet are usually on the A330 (not the most popular fleet from what I understand) but nevertheless I also meet the occasional T7 pilots and once you get past the initial "oh, everything is great here" and you can ask some more specific questions, then things suddenly aren't that rosy anymore.
The thing is that it's natural for people not to hang out the dirty laundry and they want to keep up appearances, so usually it requires a bit of probing...
The problem is that most people (especially the ones suffering from the '4 gold stripes on shinier and bigger jet syndrome' who are thinking about joining these ME outfits) do not probe or ask specific questions. They just hear what they want to hear and stop asking critical questions after they hear the initial: "oh it's pretty good here!"
They daydream of one day telling their 737/A320 friends that they are captain on an A380, have a boat, a 4x4, a great apartment, made some extra cash speculating in the next real estate bubble and that they throw a T-bone steak on the BBQ every weekend with friends!
"Get rich quick and ignore all the downsides until it smacks you in the face," is the motto, so why join a decent EU/US airline at the bottom of the seniority list, when the glossy brochure suggests that you can have it all immediately?
p.s. I know that there will always a few moaners in every company, yet if you read the threads that I posted previously, you'll see that there are not many people who contradict or argue with the moaners. To me that suggests that there is a lot of truth to the story.
One paragraph by the "Emirates the Road Ahead" thread topic starter sums it up beautifully:
I look forward to this year’s salary review with an expectation of a least 10% and hopefully another 20% to advance us in some small measure towards where things once were. Then I probably could “kick-start the year with renewed energy and vigour.” Because frankly I’m exhausted, deflated, demoralized and like so many others here I am tidying up my affairs in the UAE and working on my exit strategy.