[spaceman_2020]

All these people theorizing the end of work have never actually worked in a large company, and don’t understand the motivations of people making hiring decisions.

The larger a company gets, the more careerists it attracts. For careerists, “number of people managed” is a key performance indicator (and a boardroom/resume bragging right).

The human motivations of decision makers - to advance their own careers by being the manager that manages more people - is completely misaligned with these future efficiency hypotheses

As long as that remains true, we will continue to see bloat and companies hiring way more people than they need.

[bushbaba]

To go from Sr. Manager to Director requires having experiencing managing managers who report to you. How do you get more middle managers? You hire more people.

How do you go from Sr. Manager to Manager, you manage a large team, and create a need to have your org have multiple managers.

So yes, lots of perverse incentives to grow your org so-as to grow your career.

[jiggawatts]

This is the management equivalent of measuring developer productivity by the number of lines of code written.

[shapefrog]

This is the management equivalent of measuring developer productivity by the number of monitors they have.

[Aeolun]

Exactly, except that managers do not seem to get judged for striving for that metric.

[throw868788]

I see that in places I've worked. I've always resisted growing my team's headcount as I've seen it break efficiency first hand. However I'm well aware it makes our team less noticed, and less attractive when other companies ask what's my current reporting count as a metric of how senior you are.

[seesaw]

You must be me. I have a very strong technical team, and our work is foundational for the product. But it is harder to convey that impact in interviews, compared to saying you have a larger team and manage a large budget. I feel companies don’t value efficiency.

[bko]

Right, so more efficiencies could free up resources to hire even more middle managers or administrative staff. It's only natural that well funded startups will have roles for "experience coordinator" or something. You think FAANG would have such a large headcount if they didn't have crazy margins?

There are some other tides working in the favor of bloated salaries and payrolls. One is the focus of "stakeholder capitalism". Most of the large companies are held by ETFs. The large banks that run the ETFs are less concerned about individual efficiencies of any one company (they own them all anyway), but are more interested in other things (green initiatives, social causes, etc). So the decisions being made at these companies are less about profit and more about servicing "stakeholders", be it their employees, the community, the environment. That's all fine, but it's difficult to track and hold executives responsible. A bloated staff is fine because you don't want to lay off employees. Or various money losing departments are okay because they're servicing the community.

[mixmastamyk]

If there's anything folks like more than reports, its money. Like the savings and goosed stock price from offshoring, especially "offshoring to local robots," which are even more reliable.

[StanislavPetrov]

Which folks? A lot of careerists and middle-managers on a salary in big corporations don't get profit sharing or options.

[mixmastamyk]

Leadership usually doesn't care too much about those folks either.

[dadoge]

Counterpoint: if the company actually had good upper management, they will only let the mid level managers grow their team if it brings value to the company.

No org is perfect, but I keep seeing this take again and again and again, yet rarely any form of acknowledgment that it could be good for the company to incentivize proactively growing a team