Investors in high-growth companies like to see rapidly expanding headcounts. And when you're growing fast there's a real impetus to fill seats FAST and there's

Investors in high-growth companies like to see rapidly expanding headcounts. And when you're growing fast there's a real impetus to fill seats FAST and there's not much discipline around making sure you're hiring well. So you end up having to collect more people than you need because not all of them are well suited to their roles and you've got a lot of new projects that everyone isn't fully spun up on so there's always a surprising proportion of people who are being spun up or wound down on random projects all the time without directly committing any code. Companies that grow like this tend to end up with a lot of dead weight and bad business processes that spontaneously appear to shift that dead weight around to where they don't drag things down.