I've been ops for about 15 years and understaffing us is such a huge problem. I just joined a company with 2 other Ops for 80 developers over 8-10 teams, my previous had 7 for 70 and was one of the few places I felt like I could take a breath and relax, easily take days off, etc. I felt more like a SWE than ops with regard to work-life balance/on-call rotations/ability to do creative & research work, etc.

I'm glad those 2 ops at my current spot finally have help but they were alone for years while the company was generating a ton of revenue which bothers me but seemingly was their own decision; nobody told them they were overworked until us more SR ops people arrived and went out of our way to pull work away from them.

Having all sorts of different teams (style, culture, language) relying on you to not gate-keep is.. stressful at times. I try to context switch as little as possible but sometimes it just can't be avoided.