I can't speak for other fields, but I've worked in IT as a sysadmin for about a decade at a bunch of different companies, big and small.

I've never worked at a place that was close to "overstaffed" nearly every place I've worked we've needed at least 2-4 additional people on staff.

Everybody was overworked, overwhelmed with tickets and projects, working 50+ hours a week constantly.

But upper management and executives love claiming that staffing is maxed out and needs to get more lean. Like, dude, our IT team is handling dozens of tickets a day, running 5-10 different infrastructure projects simultaneously, and keeping near-decade old equipment alive because we were denied our third budget request in a row.

Instead of always worrying about having a job, maybe we should be pissed that not having a job means homelessness and starvation.

Not having proper safety nets in a society that demonizes homelessness as a moral failing is the real problem.

Oracle terminated 30k employees.

Theres a couple people I saw recently that went though the process of getting another job.

One was network engineer, he was snatched up really quick (less than a week looking). Another was a software developer and had a harder time (something around a month from what they told me in the meetup).

Both were remote.

I know it kinda sucks...but there are still jobs out there. They are just not in the MAANGA world ATM. I personally think those companies are trying to get beyond having staff as much as possible (which is silly).

Unless their employees can take vacations whenever they want with no pushback about coverage and they’re not forcing them to work late nights and weekends, they’re not overstaffed. I don’t think there’s a tech company in this country that hasn’t squeezed every bit of their employees’ schedules that they can without major pushback. We should be working fewer hours, not overtime and until that happens, we’re absolutely not overstaffed.

They've been saying they over hired during the pandemic for years, now. There's no way they hadn't already shed those "extra" employees by now.

The place I work at I wouldn't say is "over staffed" but it is maybe "wrong-staffed".

They have a full time "scrum master" and from what I can tell all she does it share her screen so people can awkwardly tell her which tickets to click on, and she calls on people in order during the morning meeting. That's a whole-ass job. Meanwhile, devops is like crying blood because there's like 2 of them managing decades of systems, and no senior engineering roles have been backfilled after people left for years.

Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.

Those experts are whackadoo insane and/or on the payroll.

Yeah, a lack of revenue can also be stated as "overstaffed", I suppose. "We have too many people for the business we no longer have."

From my time in the industry, I can say most are probably 25-75% overstaffed for their current requirements, but not for their current dreams. They invent projects they think will do something and hire for that, but it doesn't align with the work they should or need to be doing. Their dreams aren't always valid or rooted in reality within their experience and market niche.

So you get the wrong staff for the job you need to do because you staffed for what you wanted to do and end up with more people needing to do jobs they don't have the knowledge or experience for trying to use AI to fill that gap.

You get an inefficient work force and end up having to cut the wrong things to make the line keep going up in unsustainable ways. The pressure to make line go up often gets in the way of making the line more consistent. And it often gets in the way of that dream that maybe could have worked if you gave it the time it needed to bake before giving up to make the board happy.

I manage a web team for a pretty big company. It's just me and a Jr dev. Even with AI, we still can't keep up.