[throwaway9301]

The interesting question is: "why?".

David Graeber's book "Bullsh*t Jobs" is about that.

These companies main priority is not efficiency and productivity. If it was, they could hire less people to do the same work and that would foster unemployment.

They have a political and social role: hire as many people as possible. Keep them employed and busy and keep an eye on them.

Become too big to fail and you'll be rewarded with overbudgeted contracts (and even bailouts, sometimes).

[chucksmash]

> These companies main priority is not efficiency and productivity.

Still with you here...

> They have a political and social role: hire as many people as possible.

You lose me here.

Most companies are out to make as much money as possible now or in the near future. I spent the first three years of my career in QA at a total BS Jobs company (120k+ employees, lots of government contract and enterprise software work). So many people coasted, nothing ever really got done, etc. Even in a totally dysfunctional organization like that, hiring was either about backfilling attrition losses or hiring people that were expected to directly or indirectly contribute to revenue growth.

Never attribute to a vast socio-political conspiracy that which can be explained by the emergent incompetence of a large organization.

[shantly]

> Most companies are out to make as much money as possible now or in the near future.

The company in the abstract, sure. Not managers and VPs and such. Not even the C-suite, necessarily, or at least they likely have other concerns in addition to just the company making money. It's the principal agent problem plus the management version of résumé-driven-development, basically.