[polk]

>Someone, somewhere at that company chose to hire someone... and they know what they want them to do. Why aren't they telling me?

This isn't necessarily true. As a counter example, I've seen team leads who claim they need to hire more engineers in order to keep up with workload. In reality, it's a process issue, but why put in the hard work of streamlining company operations, when they can just request more people underneath them. Not only is it less effort, but they also get to say "I grew the team 2x and now manage y people" which in turn increases their compensation.

It's a case of poorly aligned incentives: managers are supposed to do more with less, but their compensation structure rewards the opposite.