> we have too many people working at most companies. I half-disagree with this. My take is significantly more top-down: senior management has a deficient conc

> we have too many people working at most companies. I half-disagree with this. My take is significantly more top-down: senior management has a deficient concept of how product development works. They believe Manpower is to be spent to achieve revenue, either by directly selling the result as a product (e.g. airplanes selling wifi to passengers) or by it being a differentiating feature for the sales department. This causes every allocation decision (like hiring) to fundamentally be biased around getting a tangible return: by creating new projects, new features, and new buggy microservices. Further, since management only has two knobs (manpower and timeline) to play with, they like to move them to feel like they're optimizing the project. It's always the same fallacies, too: "we hired more people so we can create explosive growth", "we created ambitious timelines, now we're striving to fill them" etc. I don't have a solution for this, except to note that it can be mitigated by managing up. Construct your own narrative, and take advantage of the fact that the non-technical people above you govern almost entirely by gut feeling.