[nostrademons]

Or that every other 100K+ employee tech company has become sluggish, moribund, and then eventually faded away.

It makes a lot of sense when you consider the incentives of all the individuals involved. Individual line managers think "I need more headcount so I can increase my scope of responsibility and get promoted," and go to their directors with "These are all the cool new projects we could be undertaking if only we had headcount." Directors think "If I don't provide career-advancement opportunities for my best managers, they'll leave for a competitor and the best engineers will follow them, and my carefully-constructed org will collapse", then go to finance with "These are all the cool new projects we could be undertaking if only we had budget." Finance people look at the negative real interest rates that were present in 2020-2022, think "Just about any project that has any chance of generating additional usage or revenue beats the 2% nominal and -6% real returns we can get from the market, so these project ideas look pretty good" and tells the CEO "Our best bet is to invest in the company itself, so we are going to greenlight all the headcount requests."