I don’t get why people keep complaining about being overloaded when they just keep accepting every new task without pushing back. If you keep doing everything thrown at you, of course they’ll keep piling it on. Why wouldn’t they? Start saying no, drop lower-priority work, and make it clear you’re drowning. Nothing changes if you just quietly suffer through it.
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Crazy expectations from management. They offer training in new product. I am all for gaining new knowledge. But they expect you to do the training in your own time. No allocated time off daily work to pick up the training. Jump straight into the new product as well as work your old products. No easing into it.
Training is cr-ppy as well. Mostly virtual recordings or different time zones.
Gone are the old days of flying to new country and training and meeting your colleagues in other time zones.
Guess which form of training helped me retained the most knowledge. I swear management have never done the work of anyone below them and do not understand the reality of hard work.
Over several layoffs I got handed someone else's workload who got the boot. After doing three people's job, I finally pushed back (a little). Next thing I know, I'm the one getting showed to the door. The poor dastard who got my workload quit a month later. Not sure which su---r is doing it all now.
Whenever I got a new "top priority" assignment on top of an already-full load, I asked my manager "which of A, B, or C should I deprioritize to make room?". Usually didn't get an answer (terrible manager, aspires to be like blame-everyone-else Mark B), so I would make a decision, document it in email or chat, and move on. I was the top performer on the team, so I figured our manager could defend us, at least work with us, or deal with the consequence, but I wasn't going to ki-l myself for those people. You have to protect yourself; no one else in that company will.
(Eventually the direct manager crossed lines of abusiveness and of course HR didn't care, so I quit.)
We sort of tried this with one team. It didn't work.
We had way too many tasks coming in, and not enough people to do them. We were down 2-3 people, and weren't even back up to par with backfills. Asking weekly on the updates for hiring from that got us nowhere, and there were multiple hiring freezes.
So we stopped picking up tasks we couldn't do, and let our SLAs get breached. That actually cost OT money, so they had to pay attention. Management brought in other teams to help pick up the slack in the general queue, and we kept working at a reasonable pace on our own specialized tasks. That only lasted a few weeks while we cleared our backlog, but then we were right back where we started, drowning.
So nothing changed, even after making noise about it. Even the managers cycled through the team a few times - they couldn't fix it. We all got punished at year end reviews because we didn't meet our KPAs as a team.