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The empire building thing is the worst. "We don't actually have anything for you to do, we just have funding for three more people, and we need to hire people
by greyhair 6y ago
The empire building thing is the worst.
"We don't actually have anything for you to do, we just have funding for three more people, and we need to hire people for those slots or we'll lose our funding. And our team size is in the second quintile for headcount, so we need to grow a little."
So basically hiring bench warmers. I actually encountered that once in my so far 37 years. It was a total wtf moment for me.
- ryandrake 6y agoThe only place I actually encountered this was at a defense contractor where if you did not have clearance, and they didn't happen to have uncleared work ready to staff, then if they wanted to hire you, they'd have to have you do nothing for 6 months while your clearance went through. All other companies I've worked at (including FAANGs) have always had 3-10X more unstaffed work than they could possibly do with their current staff and always had something for new people to onboard into. We'd be constantly giving leadership the bad news: "We'd love to do projects A-G, but only have enough people to do A, B and maybe C."