[AnActualGirl]

1. It's really tough from a management perspective to be staffed correctly all the time. The last job I had did just what you suggested, waited until we had more work to hire more people, but the result was that it was a good month before they could find qualified people to give offers to and a few more weeks before they started, and then another week before they'd had enough training to actually be helpful at work. This resulted in the rest of us pulling 70-80 hour weeks, sometimes on Saturday and Sunday, during the lag time between needing more people and getting more people. At a salaried job, I'd rather have nothing to do than be putting in overtime without overtime pay...

Story: during one of these hellish weeks, on a night when our team planned to stay until around 1am, a girl on my project started complaining to me about how she hates driving in the dark and gets nervous about being sleepy behind the wheel. I'm like "you'll be fine"...half an hour later she swings by to tell me she's leaving (this is at 10pm) and she'll see me tomorrow. I find out later that she'd gone to our project manager and CRIED about not wanting to drive while tired (literally crying) and he'd told her to go home since he didn't want to deal with her. She quit a week later.