[tylerdurden91]

This problem is widespread in FAANG.

At the core, organizations want to align individual growth with organizational & business growth.

Because most of these companies run many businesses with wide varying nature of revenue impact, they've decided to use size of organization as a proxy for business impact. From my experience at Amazon, there's a process to acquire additional headcount where business leaders will assess your proposal and approve additional headcount.

However, most mid level managers now purely optimize for headcount with complete disregard for customer value or business impact. I think we're missing 2 things:

- Leaders who can discern whether some work requires X people or 2X people. The margins are not off by 10-20%, they are off by 200-500%.

- Feedback loops. I havent seen this talked about much in the tech circles yet. Once headcount is assigned, there's no further checks on whether original goals have been met. Leaders, managers & teams move on to find even more land to grab. If we had feedback loops around what that additional headcount has achieved, a lot of the empire building behavior could be curtailed.