In terms of being short staffed what is the worst work environment you have been in?

[Locut0s]

I'm sure there are some horror stories out there, with the economy in the state it's in and companies making cutbacks people are finding themselves doing the job of 2 or 3 people with the same pay, or less pay. When this happens in an office environment it's not usually noticeable to others as that's not the face of the company. When it comes to retail jobs though it can get ugly. Lineups, angry customers, frustrated staff... Retail jobs have such high turn over rates that it's not uncommon for a store to find itself short 2 or more staff members at times, people quite without warning when you are already short of people for example, and of course "the show must go on" And if you get paid salary instead of hourly it gets worse as you don't get overtime. What's your worst experience?

 

[eldorado99]

I've been lucky. I've never worked anywhere where I would consider the environment "short-staffed". Sometimes people would complain about having to do too much work and that there should be more people hired, but they were just lazy asses.

 

[Wanescotting]

Right now!
I manage a restaurant. We have too many options, pulled in too many directions. I work 12 hour days. I would have plenty of staff, were it not for this idiotic breakfast. We don't have sales to justify it, yet we are stuck with it. I am leaving soon, but damn.

 

[BoomerD]

I was the only equipment operator on a job where I had to run loaders, a dozer, compactors, and the crane...Sometimes, in spite of union requirements of 2 equipment changes per day, I'd make a lift, grab the loader and backfill a column or footing, then grab the compactor and compact the fill...then jump back in the crane and make another lift...rinse and repeat numerous times.

I COULD have refused...but I enjoyed staying busy rather than sitting around waiting to make the next lift with the crane.

I'd rather work my ass off than so sit around bored.

 

[xSauronx]

I was a work study student for the admin at a community college last year. There were 5 IT people on campus, and the school didn't require that any of them work together.

So this one guy was responsible for the several servers, 45 switches, 15 - 20 APs, accounts, security....all sorts of stuff except, basically, desktop support.

there are 3 desktop support people there that arent worth much of a damn.

theres 1 other guy who oversees the "business division" tech resources and was not cooperative. thing is, he also didnt do much, and they didnt need him in that position. The school could have easily spent the budget allotted for him to do almost nothing worthwhile on an assistant for the admin to put things in order.

He had no switch configs backed up, only half the servers backed up to some extent, one DC/DNS/DHCP/AV Console box and all sorts of other issues to deal with because he had no one to help. I did a few things, but I wasnt capable (nor did I have time) to do things that really needed to get done there.

Even worse:he got to deal with the ancient PBX and telephone system before the school would call someone to fix an issue. He was vastly underpaid and overworked.

 

[Crusty]

Multi-million dollar a year business, 12 locations with 1000 employees. My department consisted of 1 full time IT manager and me, an intern for the summer. The only other full-time worker was on maternity leave.

 

[kedlav]

I worked as a team lead in a *nix environment for an applications administration team of 4. This team managed roughly 30,000 production changes per year to applications, almost exclusively happening after hours (except during crises). Further, one of the folks on the team had no Unix, WebLogic, Apache, Tomcat, or JBoss experience... he was a mainframe retread that was assigned to us when his mainframe application was replaced and had no desire to learn anything new, yet I did not have hire/fire authority

 

[Svnla]

One word - JIT- Just In Time.

Talk about stress and crazyness when sh1t hit the fan and you only have about 1 hour or two before things shut down.

 

[CrackRabbit]

I can say I have only been in one position where we were understaffed.
Was a 18+ hour a day operation with three shifts with one person working each shift, when there should have been 2 with 2 more people having overlap of each of the shifts.

Was not fun but man did I rake in the overtime.

 

[mattpegher]

We have a system in emergency medicine call "bypass", it is a suggestion to the dispatchers of ambulance squads that our facility is overloaded. However, we cannot refuse anyone, so if the ambulances aren't told that we're on bypass or if the squad choses to ignore the request, we get to see some dangerous situations. We have a limited number of physicians and when there are too many patients, you just don't get the time to be as diligent for each and every patient. Although there may be other physicians in the hospital, they are often ill equiped to step into the role efficently.
Unfortunately, you just can't staff for that kind of variation in volume.

 

[Modelworks]

In the past I managed a warranty repair center for GE, RCA, SHARP, Panasonic, and we were required by the manufacturers to do a 24hr turnaround on anything entering the center. We had to unbox, check the customer complaint and either fix it or have parts ordered and have the item shipped out the next day if it could be fixed. The worst was sharp, they constantly sent us cordless phones. $25 phones that cost them $125 to have us fix but they would send us 10 at a time. One month there were quite a few people out sick and I got stuck for about a week repairing 10+ phones a day, making orders for parts, answering angry customers complaints about why they couldn't get a new phone instead, and doing it all basically by myself while still doing other manager stuff for the other brands we serviced.

It was shortly after that I left that industry area.

 

[Locut0s]

I was the only equipment operator on a job where I had to run loaders, a dozer, compactors, and the crane...Sometimes, in spite of union requirements of 2 equipment changes per day, I'd make a lift, grab the loader and backfill a column or footing, then grab the compactor and compact the fill...then jump back in the crane and make another lift...rinse and repeat numerous times.

I COULD have refused...but I enjoyed staying busy rather than sitting around waiting to make the next lift with the crane.

I'd rather work my ass off than so sit around bored.

Depends on the type of work. If it's physical work like that yes I agree, though I'm horribly out of shape right now. If it's something like serving customers then hell no, people get pissed off if they have to wait and it all hoes to hell.

 

[Locut0s]

Multi-million dollar a year business, 12 locations with 1000 employees. My department consisted of 1 full time IT manager and me, an intern for the summer. The only other full-time worker was on maternity leave.

Sounds real fun. Stress much?

 

[Locut0s]

One word - JIT- Just In Time.

Talk about stress and crazyness when sh1t hit the fan and you only have about 1 hour or two before things shut down.

JIT stands for a whole business model. Which end were you working at.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

I have been in several positions like that. At the last company, they laid off a network engineer and a help desk person and that caused two network admins to leave. I was doing their jobs and part of the network engineering position as well along with leading several huge global projects.

At this place, I am the only Sharepoint person. That doesn't sound bad until you consider the size of our Sharepoint environment and the fact that it is mission critical for a large, VERY well known organization with huge visibility. I'm technically a "developer" but in reality I am a Sharepoint developer, Sharepoint engineer/architect, business analyst, project manager, act as a SQL DBA (SCARY considering my lack of training in it!), Sharepoint application firewall engineer, and I still get bugged by the server team because the guy who replaced me there doesn't really know what's going on especially with respect to VMWare and AD. I've about had it and have been looking for other opportunities, though I am not sure I want to jump into consulting just yet.

 

[Crusty]

Sounds real fun. Stress much?

Wasn't really too bad, we mostly just spent time fixing things instead of doing any real work towards progressing the infrastructure.

 

[Locut0s]

We have a system in emergency medicine call "bypass", it is a suggestion to the dispatchers of ambulance squads that our facility is overloaded. However, we cannot refuse anyone, so if the ambulances aren't told that we're on bypass or if the squad choses to ignore the request, we get to see some dangerous situations. We have a limited number of physicians and when there are too many patients, you just don't get the time to be as diligent for each and every patient. Although there may be other physicians in the hospital, they are often ill equiped to step into the role efficently.
Unfortunately, you just can't staff for that kind of variation in volume.

Damn yeah, I never thought about the ER. I can well imagine that would be nuts! And not a little stress too! That's life and death.

 

[nageov3t]

probably my current IT job.

we're not too badly staffed overall (1 person got fired last week and hasn't been replaced yet and we could really use an extra person on weekend overnights, but that's it) but my old boss (before he got fired) had a really bad habit of replacing indians with chiefs.

so we've got a dozen gurus and specialists and like 2 people to hammer away at the day-to-day, grunt issues and work the crappy schedules demanded by a 24/7/365 enviornment.

 

[AreaCode707]

Worst was running the manual performance review process for T-Mobile while we put in a new application. Three weeks a quarter I would do 6am-4am days, and worked about 14 hours a day the rest of the quarter, with maybe 8 hour Saturdays and 4 hour Sundays.

That company was so fucked up.

 

[Fritzo]

Tech support. Nothing like talking to a person with problems after they've been waiting in the phone queue for 45 minutes.

 

[gaidensensei]

Some kind of production department, hands down would face the worst in being understaffed.

While I wasn't involved in the production, I was in QC and QA for an Aerospace Engineering company now acquired by ATI Ladish. Worked in two parts during my time there, in ultrasound testing of metals and tensile strength micrograin lab before moving over to the IT dept, which was a lot easier.

It's like working in hell when some other department or company is requesting a certain shipment completed on short notice. Your company is in charge of the production, then if your product is something that everyone else entrusts their lives onto you - in our case, airplane turbines, there's no room for slacking off and plenty for making mistakes.

 

[Svnla]

JIT stands for a whole business model. Which end were you working at.

We were in the back end, almost at the end of the product cycle (manufacturing environment). When things went smoothly, it was great. When things went not too smooth (due to manpower shortage, weather delay, parts shortage, etc.), then it was a HUGE pain in the behind to put it midly.

At least back then I did get pay OT and the benefits were not just good, but great (free healthcare, free college tuition, and so on).

 

[Locut0s]

I have been in several positions like that. At the last company, they laid off a network engineer and a help desk person and that caused two network admins to leave. I was doing their jobs and part of the network engineering position as well along with leading several huge global projects.

At this place, I am the only Sharepoint person. That doesn't sound bad until you consider the size of our Sharepoint environment and the fact that it is mission critical for a large, VERY well known organization with huge visibility. I'm technically a "developer" but in reality I am a Sharepoint developer, Sharepoint engineer/architect, business analyst, project manager, act as a SQL DBA (SCARY considering my lack of training in it!), Sharepoint application firewall engineer, and I still get bugged by the server team because the guy who replaced me there doesn't really know what's going on especially with respect to VMWare and AD. I've about had it and have been looking for other opportunities, though I am not sure I want to jump into consulting just yet.

Ouch.

As for the bolded I've always wondered why companies don't take this into account. I've seen this happen a number of times. A company needs to lay off a few people to downsize but they go about it very poorly and create an environment of stress and fear. This causes other people to quit and before they know it they have far too little staff and work is compromised.

 

[Locut0s]

We were in the back end, almost at the end of the product cycle (manufacturing environment). When things went smoothly, it was great. When things went not too smooth (due to manpower shortage, weather delay, parts shortage, etc.), then it was a HUGE pain in the behind to put it midly.

At least back then I did get pay OT and the benefits were not just good, but great (free healthcare, free college tuition, and so on).

Things not near as good today in terms of pay and benefits I imagine.

 

[Locut0s]

Worst was running the manual performance review process for T-Mobile while we put in a new application. Three weeks a quarter I would do 6am-4am days, and worked about 14 hours a day the rest of the quarter, with maybe 8 hour Saturdays and 4 hour Sundays.

That company was so fucked up.

Were you compensated for the hours? I've heard of similar horror stories in which people didn't even get any more pay.