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this post was submitted on 04 May 2026
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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.
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.
My whole career was like this until I moved to the public sector. Now, I wouldn't say we are over staffed, but my team of 3 has about 2.5 people worth of work, such that if one person is out we can still handle everything, if two people are out it gets stressful.
By comparison it feels like I am exhaling for the first time in 25 years.
Add onto that, the fact that upper management is 4 or 5 people deep as well. Basically more management than workers.
It's a pyramid - almost always is. If you average 5 direct reports, 5 deep, that's 1 at the top, 5 on level 2, 25 on level 3, 125 on level 4, and 625 worker bees. The bees still outnumber the managers, which is how the managers justify 20% raises while the bees have to suck it up with 2% (in an economy that inflated prices 4%) - too many bees to give all of them a real raise, much cheaper to "reward and retain our good people" at the top. /s
In 30 years of employment, I've never had a job where any department at any company I've been with seemed properly staffed to say nothing of overstaffed.
I imagine, this is more about software devs than sysadmins. Sure, you'll hire a couple more sysadmins to help with the massive user growth during the pandemic. But especially combined with loans basically being made free in the same time, it's suddenly worth hiring a bunch of devs to build the Next Big Thing™.
Once those loans start costing again and the user numbers fall off, you quickly have lots of devs that you can't find tasks for, that are worth doing.
Management loves them some rank & yank - not only are you culling the low performers, you're retaining the doormats who you know will put up with all kinds of BS going forward.
I think most of those people are gone. The pandemic was 6 years ago. We’ve had significant layoffs in tech 2022-2026.