The parent argues that it's "a useless but noisy zero-sum jockeying for a rungs on the socio-economic ladder" And you argue "If companies care about maximizing

The parent argues that it's "a useless but noisy zero-sum jockeying for a rungs on the socio-economic ladder" And you argue "If companies care about maximizing productivity and profits, and given America's hyper-competitive economy and super-fickle stock market where the difference between meeting the earnings estimate versus missing it by a penny can make the difference between a stock being up 10% or down 10%, why would a company waste money on jobs that are bullshit" This is the same argument, just with a different spin. In the instance of Facebook, it was able to provide it's core utility with some software cobbled together by one guy in his dorm room over a couple weeks. So what are the other 25,000 employees for? It's not to make Facebook more useful, it's to prevent some other college kid from building a social media network that displaces it. It's all just a silly game that isn't very fun to play. One could argue that Facebook's core utility is now in delivering ads, but nobody likes looking at ads, and companies would rather not spend on ads if they didn't need to to compete, so again, it's all just a silly game. Very little of it is doing anything that is either useful or wanted.