#overworked

The survivors of ER are all going to experience the consequences of “lean” teams that have been the unfortunate reality for areas that have been operating lean for years already. Doing the job of 3 or 4 is the best you can hope for. Doing 5 or 6 jobs is the norm due to attrition. The worst though is when you have a low performer on your team that does essentially nothing and everyone else has to pick up the slack and there is no end in sight because the role is occupied and management/HR are too incompetent to get b-ms out and backfill the position.

Once your area is hollowed out by ER pray you don’t you have a deadweight in your group that causes everyone else to be overworked, crushing their vitality and morale. Leadership will do nothing to save you and the most you can hope for is some tough conversations with the do nothing colleagues, extra coaching and maybe a PIP after an extended period of inactivity/bottom barrel performance. Yet, leadership will still hammer you all to produce high quality product on priority lead times while shoveling more on your plate each passing quarter as if you don’t have an anchor dragging you to the depths. I’ve seen workers do basically nothing for YEARS except collect salary and bonuses with little to no consequences while leaders/directors/GPs work everyone else to the bone and dole out meets expectations.

I’ve not see leadership one time correct a resourcing issue or solve bandwidth problems effectively. In fact, I’ve rarely seen them do a thing at all except sit in meetings or write single sentence performative emails designed to appear like they adding value that more often than not cause confusion or re-work. In my experience, these high grades mainly exist to dump the work downhill and demand results. The best of them might tell you some encouraging lies or give you an attaboy once in a blue moon to muster some motivation. Most however are too lazy, stupid or self-absorbed to even do that much.

I swear, I wish I had one of these leadership roles where I got paid many times my current salary to nothing all day except soak up kudos work product I didn’t lift a finger to produce and point the finger at anyone lower than me on the org chart when things go wrong.

Sad to say all the worthless higher-ups in my sphere made it through ER unscathed with their ridiculous salaries intact. Now I’ve got continue putting up with their nonsense until I’m sh-t-canned myself or through the grace of the maker locate a new job externally.

We’ve truly lost the plot and us plebs are paying the price. Everyone else is laughing as they drink spicy margaritas out of fu--ing Waterford Crystal carafes at their 6000sq foot summer homes. FML.

October is right around the corner and its layoff season again at HMH. Massive customer problems with this years back to school. Lots of customers asking for their money back. New CTO, with an attention span problem and flare for unprofessional behavior, dead set on getting rid of most of the technology staff. 80 hour work weeks. continuous stream of abuse to drive people to quitting so they don't have to pay severance pay..... and the result is?, you guessed it, October is fast approaching, massive layoffs both in technology and across the company. One cannot imagine why year after year of layoffs could have possibly resulted in such bad outcomes.

Will remaining employees get any financial incentive to pick up all of these work from the employees leaving with VSP? Our area has been hit very hard, we were already understaffed and overworked. Now what? Are remaining employees feeling optimistic? Or will remaining employees begin to leave for greener pastures?

We literally can't function with what we have left. I guess they'll now overload us with work until we quit. Save them money on severance. I can't think of another reason why they'd do something like this.

SM Energy needs to give people room to breathe because everyone is overworked. With AI and automation available the company should be helping employees. Not increasing their workload. the IT team needs to be rebuilt because people have stopped asking for help, knowing it is often faster to fix things on their own. all the strong it talent keeps leaving and what is left is undertrained and inexperienced. good people need to be kept instead of replaced with hires who require more training.

Mgmt should be cleaned out because the culture is struggling and expectations are unclear. communication from the top doesn’t always filter down and it makes the work harder than it should be. slow down, be upfront with expectations, and remember that client needs should guide the work.

The team is stretched thin now that so many are gone. The people we lost had years of experience, and replacing that is not simple. New hires will need months of training while deadlines keep piling up. Everyone left is exhausted and it will only get worse.

Management keeps praising people who push endless tasks onto others instead of fixing the problem. The same few employees get buried in extra work while leaders act like that is normal. Someone needs to take a hard look at how this place is being run, and I mean now.

Used until I’m worn down, then easily discarded. I no longer feel like a human being or a professional with over 30 years of specialized experience. It’s as if none of it ever mattered. As someone who once took real pride in my work, it’s been disheartening to watch what companies like ours have gradually become. The shift has been subtle but steady - eroding purpose, value, and basic respect for employees. The way people are treated now feels like near-complete disregard. At this stage, it’s probably too late for me to change careers, or even companies, because of my age. But I hope younger colleagues start to look at their careers with a different lens. Unless something gives, the culture will only continue to decline.

I don’t work there, but I’ve watched what this place has done to my sister. She’s given them everything—early mornings, late nights, weekends, endless events. And she’s not the only one. So many of you have sacrificed your time, your health, even your families, because you believed in being loyal and dedicated.

But what does this company give back? Not gratitude, not respect, not recognition. Instead, after draining people dry, they toss you out like you were nothing. It’s not a “thank you” for years of service—it’s a cold shove out the door.

We used to joke it was like a cult. Turns out we were right. A cult takes your energy, your devotion, your soul—and when you’re no longer useful, it discards you. That’s exactly what’s happening here.

To everyone getting laid off: you deserved better than this. And no matter what they try to make you believe, the failure is theirs—not yours.

Funny how things change. When she was climbing the ranks, she blasted the board as 'male, pale, and stale.' Now as CEO, the company runs like a sweatshop—understaffed, overworked, and underpaid.

My husband was laid off from Dell (back in July) after 10 years there, but was recently offered a similar role at HPE, and for better pay than what he was making at Dell (in sales).

My concern is HPE will just be more of the same, understaffed, overworked, and with just as much risk of another layoff as Dell.

Does anyone have any advice or experience going from Dell to HPE that might make me feel better about him taking this offer? He has another potential offer from another smaller company, but it doesn’t pay as well. But I’m thinking it might be worth it to work at a smaller place that might be less stressful on him.

He says it’s better to take the offer he has that’s for sure and for more money, but after reading the posts here, it makes me nervous he’s going from the oven to the frying pan.

The sheer volume of work communication is overwhelming. It feels like I'm stuck in a tailspin of Jira tickets, Slack and Teams messages, and endless slide decks and worthless meetings. Data is buried on the network; nobody seems to care. The work itself is often straightforward, but the process we're using is a mess filled with red tape and bureaucracy. It's no wonder we're constantly redoing work and bleeding money. Recalls are the norm, and we've only seen the tip of the iceberg, folks; thousands of cars with the same inherent issues will soon go belly up. $$$ spent on new buildings and programs with little hope for success. I have a feeling layoffs are just around the corner, which is how things usually go here. F

working overtime was a problem before private equity takeover.
But now it is a bigger problem. Without QEs, developer has to do job of two people in same timeframe while maintaining "high quality". This is a death knell because escalated issue, due to management incompetence, has to be fixed by overworked developers :-(

I don't understand how it's possible to lay people off when myself and my coworkers are so swamped with work that we are working 12 hour days plus weekends on salary?? So stupid! Reorg! We've lost so many longer timers with so much knowledge..we literally had to hire 3 people to fill one of their positions! Just one! But instead they are hiring more upper management!