Yeah. People don't appreciate how wasteful companies can be; being brutal about it, odds are a lot of those resources are unnecessary. I say this as someone wh

Yeah. People don't appreciate how wasteful companies can be; being brutal about it, odds are a lot of those resources are unnecessary. I say this as someone who was an unnecessary resource. In the early 10s I got hired into the "machine learning" division of a ~7000 person company, which was a local ML startup that had gotten acquired. After starting there, I quickly realized: the acquisition was just done by an exec/VP who decided the company needed a machine learning strategy, but had no idea what to actually do with the acquisition. I was there for about a year, and I couldn't really tell you what me, or anyone on my team, did that provided any value. We played around with Spark; we hired a few PhD students to mess around with some data, for no real reason; we had a dev who spent 6 months writing an insane purely functional CRUD HTTP framework. We ostensibly had some long-term project we were working on, but literally no functional software to show by the time I left. I was well-compensated and treated extremely well (fully stocked liquor cabinet and we start pouring drinks at 2pm on Friday, whoo!) yet probably the most miserable I had ever been in my professional life. Anyway... I've found that my experience is not uncommon. Companies of 1000+ people have a lot of entire teams who are not really contributing anything to the business. During the boom times it's simply not worth it for management to spend their time trying to hunt down those teams, though; the salaries of 40 people is a drop in the bucket for a company of that size. Plus you never want to make cuts to your own headcount, as that reduces your power as a manager.