It sounds like poor planning on behalf of management to me. Unless you work in some kind of micro enterprise with <5 employees, good planning should leave sufficient capacity to enable at least some vacation time to continue.
My last help desk job we used to try to run at 70% capacity. Basically meaning you would be on a call 70% of time you were scheduled on the phone. That way when shit happened and we got busy there was capacity to handle it. People were happy and did their jobs well. Then new management came and decided we should aim for 100% and stopped letting us replace people as they left (they never explicitly said this but looking at the numbers when they did let us hire told the story). Everything went to shit after that. People were miserable, no one was able to help each other so there was no knowledge transfer and after the experienced people left they had to reduce their responsibilities down to just the most basic tasks and have the other app support teams take back over what the desk was previously doing for them. By the time I left the whole IT side of that company was a dumpster fire while the execs continued to try to grow the company without investing in it.
It sounds like poor planning on behalf of management to me. Unless you work in some kind of micro enterprise with <5 employees, good planning should leave sufficient capacity to enable at least some vacation time to continue.
The majority of businesses are small
A little bit. But mistakes happen, it’s a huge order, and they were transparent about it. I can accept that so long as it stays infrequent.
My last help desk job we used to try to run at 70% capacity. Basically meaning you would be on a call 70% of time you were scheduled on the phone. That way when shit happened and we got busy there was capacity to handle it. People were happy and did their jobs well. Then new management came and decided we should aim for 100% and stopped letting us replace people as they left (they never explicitly said this but looking at the numbers when they did let us hire told the story). Everything went to shit after that. People were miserable, no one was able to help each other so there was no knowledge transfer and after the experienced people left they had to reduce their responsibilities down to just the most basic tasks and have the other app support teams take back over what the desk was previously doing for them. By the time I left the whole IT side of that company was a dumpster fire while the execs continued to try to grow the company without investing in it.
Depends on the timing.
Random time? Sure.
However, there’s a tendency for certain times to have a lot of people to take off the same time. December, holidays, time that schools are out.