Sounds like you think there’s people that shouldn’t be needed? Are they on their way to a layoff or is the company happily holding on to them?

If there are no layoffs in their future, they must be creating value you can’t yet see.

Get closer to the work they do and maybe you’ll see it.

Also: the “waste” might be dwarfed by scale. For example Twitter famously had Linux kernel devs on the payroll. Why would a tweet company need kernel developers? Simple. At that scale a salary was nothing next to the gains if some primitive they needed could be built, or some bug or perf problem could be promptly fixed. An engineer could contribute many times what they cost the company, so although it’s far from Twitter’s core business it’s still ROI positive.

There’s also the matter of organizational “slack”. Have a look at this sound advice: https://www.seangoedecke.com/doing-nothing-at-work/?ref=dail...

Beware when making assumptions from afar. Get closer and really try to understand. Things work the way they do for good reasons.

> Sounds like you think there’s people that shouldn’t be needed? Are they on their way to a layoff or is the company happily holding on to them?

> If there are no layoffs in their future, they must be creating value you can’t yet see.

I've been involved in a few projects where the value appeared clear at the beginning, but by the end there was little value.

In one case the project failed due to incompetence and mismanagement: Basically, the project dragged on and on until it missed its market window. (What stinks is it was basically a port of a Visual Basic sales tool to a more modern v2.)

In another case I was hired into a machine learning project in a company where everyone spent a lot of time justifying their jobs. The project ultimately didn't "improve" over the non-machine-learning approach, and devolved into a "solution in search of a problem".

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As far as why the company held onto the people involved? (I left after both projects.) That's harder to explain, but I like to think of an analogy to a king holding on to a standing army: It's there when you need it, and your soldiers aren't helping the rival kingdom.

A different way to say it: One of the downsides to working in a large company is that a lot of the people there are "warm butts on seats." The company could function without them. Many of the people you work with have competence issues. You're probably a "warm butt on a seat" too, and may have some competence issues. That's why I like working for smaller companies: they can't afford to be fat.