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Comment by fyfy18 | Hacker News Reader

If you can afford it, it’s a lot better to have too many people (although your case sounds a bit extreme) than too little. I’m working at a startup where we have too little, and we are rushing to get stuff done without really thinking it through long term. Our tech debt level is growing each day.

In your case it sounds like you - and your experience - really helped other members of the team work more efficiently.

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This is where a retainer agreement can come in handy. The company is explicitly paying you to keep time free in case they need the extra workforce, but you aren't expected to even show up unless there's work to do.

I value myself more than to sit around for months so that the company may feel secure.

I usually start looking for a new job after a month, since I'm not needed here and I'm bored (I also can't talk about this with the manager, or at least whenever I tried nothing fruitful came out of it; doing opensource or just reading tutorials were usually dismissed - the best managers can come up with in these situations is that you "document everything").

Having too little people isn't too bad, in my experience. There's a lot of things you could do, that you won't be able to do, but nobody will have hurt feelings when you don't do their thing when you don't have enough people to do it. If you've got too many people and you're still pushing back on features, you're going to have a lot more hurt feelings.

Plus, at least in my experience, if you know you're not going to have time to redo something, you do it right the first time :)

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