If I stay, will we be short staffed? Is the difference between staffed, short staffed, and extremely short staffed just a margin of one? Managers will manage.
My company gave me 30 days of PTO +5 days I carried over (permitted in the contact) + 1 floating holiday
I had many issues with my boss trying to get a 3.5 week vacation approved 6 months in advance. I had to threaten with escalation to HR for him to approve them
By design. It took me a long while to realize that coming off the "cut middle management, they don't do anything" 80s and 90s outsourcing then "globalization"(outsourcing), and then startup culture that evolved "we're lean startup", the entire last 4 decades of management practices based on BS spewed by Big 4 consultancies all boils down to pretending you don't need people to do work and it will magically be completed by someone else.
When you don't design a process with failsafe staff, when something changes or goes wrong, you're immediately in the red. Most companies, and many of the processes they use have never had full staff to even see what the world would look like. Quarterly margins are too important.
That 8pm workday? Someone should have been there to deal with it, instead it's you. Maybe it was a QC person, that was never hired, or your engineer was rushing, or you went with a cheap supplier, your your Corp wants to pay absolute minimum wages so you have incredibly high turnover....these are all costs and get to be born by you, their employee. Sorry, can't approve your life outside of work. From there, when capable, willing you finally reached exhaustoln says fuck it, the cost gets passed onto the consumer.
Boeing doesn't even put doors on planes correctly anymore. I had 3 recalls for my car in the last 2 years. Any company or industry from grocery to insurance is in the same spot by depending on magical labor.
Don't be a wizard nor witch and take your time off.
That's something we (i study computer science) learned in our 3 months of BWL (Business Management teachings). You got to calculate a rate of people getting sick, and have to higher enough people so that people getting sick is tolerable without things going to shit.
This is a management problem. They don't have enough employees. And don't dare to push yourself to do more work as compensation because someone is sick, unless paid for it.