Comment by swiftcoder

No, the company obviously makes up work to occupy their spare engineering capacity - but the point in that era of BigTechs was to hoover up all the engineering talent, whether or not you needed it.

A big chunk of the company would be off doing Greenfield projects that would mostly get cancelled before they ship, another big chunk is off working on multi-year rewrites of existing services (that never finish), every successful team sprouts spin-off teams with amorphous charters like "apply machine learning to service X"...

It's a side effect of an incentive structure that drives all the managers to grow headcount as fast as they can (since you need more reports to justify promo), and money basically growing on trees in those places