Every company and every team I've ever worked for has had somewhere between 3X and 10X the amount of work in the backlog that they were staffed to do. Entire projects that were seen as priorities, but never even started because there was just no staff available to do them. Hundreds of "P1 important" bugs not getting fixed (and never getting fixed) because the limited staff was working on "P0 emergencies" all the time.

For a brief period of time, the company I worked for "overhired" which allowed them to move that multiple down to maybe 2X-5X instead of 3X-10X. We went from severely shortstaffed to very shortstaffed, but we could at least get one or two more projects done than we could before. Well, that's over now, and we're back to being severely shortstaffed.

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OldfieldFund 3 days ago | parent [-]

> 3X and 10X the amount of work in the backlog

This is an old trick to get people to work hard. It's no accident that every tech company does this.

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ryandrake 3 days ago | parent [-]

I mean, if you worked at any of these companies, you could see the bug list for yourself. These are not fake bugs filed by corporate conspirators. They're actual software defects that affect real users.

	▲	OldfieldFund 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I'm not saying the bugs aren't real. But there is a non-specific frontier of control, so to speak. And the stock prices of the big companies are always going up, and there aren't any major disasters. Usually. With more people, there could still be more bugs, and disasters could still happen. Limiting resources can work well in corporations.