Comment by hi-v-rocknroll

Yep. He's partially wrong. Corporations who stop using small, effective teams and instead hire like mad do end up with management meeting communication facilitators who don't do anything all that essential and end up with excessive layers of management. These are the people companies need less of. What companies need more of is secretaries and people who keep things humming to free up subject matter experts from doing low-value tasks, and people who don't fit neatly in a single, narrow role but demonstrably make things better.

Another way out to avoid laying off or not giving raises to essential employees is better performance management with qualitative and quantitative recognition and characterization without creating specific KPIs falling into Goodhart's law. Peer 360 evals that feed into performance reviews for cross-functional areas to show their strengths when they're supposed to be strong in that area. Also, there should be some discretion given to managers to advocate for staff who improve performance of the team or of multiple teams.