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Coming from a bit different of a situation, I am at a government systems center that runs off customer funding rather than tax money, so we take clients. My group is being run short of people just as you describe. Almost every project I have been on has been understaffed. My project last year was one year of funding to research application of deep learning for a problem that had only some classical engineering algorithms applied before. Besides the r&d, we promised to deliver software that they could use to verify experiments and test models against their systems, basically everything up to but not including integration (with integration coming later if results were good). The team was a PM, domain expert, and me. That's one person to do all the research and experiments and provide basically two working and tested software deliverables. Good times. My current project is one piece of a government effort run shared between two three letter orgs, a smaller contractor that's kind of PMing plus infrastructure, a large contractor handling modeling, and us handling correlation. We already had a correlator written in Java for portability--that is why we were brought on--so should be easy, right? A bit of data analysis, configure the software accordingly, pass off the jar and config and should be good. The effort was funded for about two people plus a PM but had had one full time and one partial for the past six months. Our part of the project ballooned to helm charts, four Kafka interconnected docker containers, security scans on all that plus a bunch more stuff required every release, lots of core rewrites to hit their scalability goals, constant data analysis because every week a performer comes in with a "hey why didn't this particular example get correlated as expected" question. Basically one person to cloudify + do data analysis on big data + rewrite Java software to scale better is just crazy. I am on it because the "half time person" left a year ago and wasn't replaced, and the full time person is now leaving also in August, so they're finally forced to restaff. I was told I'd do data analysis and algorithm work only, but over the first month I've only done security fixes and cloud infrastructure related tasking. I bring this up to point out, yeah it's cool to learn new stuff, but the shortage of people also means double or triple role work that definitely accelerates burn out. |
A big issue with understaffing is knowledge. Like in my prior job and you in your current one, you are spread across so much tech. I know that even in my current job I have certain work that is little more than Google and assume the tutorial does the job.