zlacker

Could be explained with cargo culting to some extent, e.g. large & profitable tech companies have many employees, thus we should hire as many people as possible to become large & profitable as well.

Another issue might be that without good management, the marginal utility of each new hire goes down fast. As a company trying to launch new features, fixing management is hard to measure and fix, but hiring is simple to measure and seemingly solves the problem.

>>Zanfa+(OP)
I don't think it's any of that to a significant extent. Big companies just have thousands of processes, and the body count is just what's needed to sustain all of those processes. You see the same thing in government. Yeah, 50 people can do the work of hundreds because they aren't having 6 meetings with 6 people each to propose, implement, evaluate, review, and commit the font change to the help page, plus employing all the admin staff to support those people. Big companies are.