Having worked at a series of small companies, I've seen quite a few buckle under even a couple of people leaving. An overworked department loses one person, an

Having worked at a series of small companies, I've seen quite a few buckle under even a couple of people leaving. An overworked department loses one person, and 4 people are doing the work of 5, while the business is trying to grow. The person with the highest productivity on that team gets burnt out and quits, and 3 people are doing the work of 6. At the larger companies I've worked at, I've seen the same phenomenon, specifically when upper management calls for stack ranking and doesn't thoroughly understand the business. Only after people have been cut do the problems crop up, and when those cuts hit people with unique and un-sexy skills, their department becomes a bottleneck that HR can't resolve any time soon.