Sadly many of us in tech get a rush from the 'superman' feeling that gives us. Our sheer force of effort/genius saves the day yet again. Until it burns us out, or we get dropped and realize we weren't actually valued.
I dare say at Amazon managers are encouraged to promote that sort of thing. Every project is understaffed and too short of a timeline and you bet half your team will get pulled to work on an escalation and the timelines won't change. Capacity planning assumes regretted attrition, mostly though burnout.
I just saw my org deliver a project that saved the company $4m dollars a year, and we understaffed it and burnt a heck of a lot of people out. 50% of our senior engineers have resigned in the month since launch, and 6 of our L4/L5 have too. Several without backup plans. Two off our managers left and so did a product person.
But our org head is getting a lot of praise for how cheaply and quickly the project was delivered.
Our roadmap plan for the next year is over budget by 63%, so I'm guessing we're about to do this again
