I think for large companies this is true and by design. Companies don’t like single points of failure so by design should be able to afford to loose x% if engin

I think for large companies this is true and by design. Companies don’t like single points of failure so by design should be able to afford to loose x% if engineers (or marketing etc). Of course any large company with staff in the thousands or tens of thousands will have bloat. But I’d guess a lot of the engineering headcount that is not in “core stuff” are adding value. There is a lot of value to be added by making relatively minor tweaks when your revenue and costs are in the billions. Reducing a few percent server load or getting a few basis points of additional revenue / members etc can be worth multiple teams of engineers. The company will survive if those teams are gone, but it’ll probably hurt long term growth trajectories to some extent.