After working in large corporations I only partially agree with this, if I take "unnecessary" to its literal meaning. It's impossible to keep everyone at a 80-90% busy rate at any large company just due to the inefficiencies a large system accrues, idling is embedded due to the many layers of communication, coordination requirements, etc.
I agree there's a lot of empire-building in large orgs, and perverse incentives for management promotion where headcount is directly related to their career ladder. At the same time I completely disagree with the "vast majority" take on it, you can't just hire consultants when needed for ramping up a project, institutional knowledge is extremely important in any large org and I haven't seen any yet that has a streamlined and efficient onboarding process for that. Experience matters and that is a reason to keep an overhead of employees that might look unnecessary in accounting/MBA terms but is a pool of workers with enough knowledge to ramp up a project at a moment's time if the organisation needs.
The other side of this would be to keep a ship that's efficient for the current moment but that can't be steered rapidly when needed, that might kill or stagnate an organisation pretty quickly when markets change and the reaction time is too long.
As I said, I don't disagree completely, I'm not fond of upper management in general, and quite tired of the whole career game that is played in large orgs but your point of view is very, very cynical.
I agree there's a lot of empire-building in large orgs, and perverse incentives for management promotion where headcount is directly related to their career ladder. At the same time I completely disagree with the "vast majority" take on it, you can't just hire consultants when needed for ramping up a project, institutional knowledge is extremely important in any large org and I haven't seen any yet that has a streamlined and efficient onboarding process for that. Experience matters and that is a reason to keep an overhead of employees that might look unnecessary in accounting/MBA terms but is a pool of workers with enough knowledge to ramp up a project at a moment's time if the organisation needs.
The other side of this would be to keep a ship that's efficient for the current moment but that can't be steered rapidly when needed, that might kill or stagnate an organisation pretty quickly when markets change and the reaction time is too long.
As I said, I don't disagree completely, I'm not fond of upper management in general, and quite tired of the whole career game that is played in large orgs but your point of view is very, very cynical.