3 ms·

If so many people are being misemployed, why were they hired in the first place? Did they start off doing important work, and then slowly became irrelevant, or

• thesandlord 8y ago
  > do big corporates just hire people without having a clear task for them Not all of them, but in my experience, yes.
• LanceH 8y ago
  Big companies definitely hire people -- at all levels -- who are completely irrelevant. Managers have a big incentive to hire more people because they will then have more direct reports. Directors want more managers. VP's want more directors, etc... I was on a small team at a big company in 1998. Due to recent mergers there were duplicated teams across the company. A big initiative came out that our team was in line to respond to. We (about 10 of us) put together a highly functional prototype in a couple months, put it forward showing we could take it on. Another team went out and hired 200 people and had no other presentation than an org structure. They won, and I learned a lesson.
• chocolatebunny 8y ago
  Some middle managers will overestimate how much time and people they need for a project just so they can be on time and under budget. And once you hire someone it's really hard to get rid of them until there is a layoff cycle. And usually on layoff time there's plenty of people who are actually actively making things harder for people that need firing (they try to do work but are bad at it, which causes more work for the people that are actually productive) that you don't really get around to fire the people that are just useless.