This is unfair and dismissive of many roles. Coordination in a massive, technically complex company that has to adhere to laws and regulations is a critical role. I don't get why people shit on certain roles (I'm a SWE). Our PgMs reduce friction and help us be more productive and focused. Technical writers produce customer-facing content and code, and have nothing to do with supporting internal bureaucracy. There are arguments against this in Bullshit Jobs but do you think companies pay PgMs or HR employees hundreds of thousands of dollars a year out of the goodness of their own hearts? Or maybe they actually help the business?

You realize that the reason you need to manage this organizational complexity is largely because the organization is so huge?...

The reality is that you could run LinkedIn with far, far fewer people. You probably need fewer than 100 for core engineering, and likely less than 1,000 overall if you include compliance, sales, and so on - especially since a lot of overseas compliance stuff is outsourced to consulting firms, it's not like you have a team of lawyers in every country in the world.

Before there was so much money in the system, we used to run companies that way. Two decades ago, I worked for a company that had tens of millions of users, maintained its own complex nationwide infra (no AWS back then), and had 400 full-time employees. That made coordination problems a lot easier too. We didn't need ten layers of people and project management because there just wasn't that many of us.