To add to the other replies, the issue isn’t the manager wasted some corporation or billionaires money.
The issue is that if the manager had grown the team in a way that grew revenues and value they manager could have created more than 20 roles in the entire organization. Sometimes the manager with 5 engineers and a strong vision can create enough value to hire hundreds or thousands of people throughout the company.
The manager who empire builds often creates negative value. So they create jobs for 20 people. But these jobs contribute nothing. Someone’s work in the org went to pay for those 20 jobs, and they got sucked into a black hole. Worse they require support, interact throughout the company, distract from real valuable work. In the end they contribute negative value, and the manager employed 20 people at the cost of 3 people’s jobs that could have been created but never were, their employment cost -23 people’s worth of value and contributed zero.
Now in many organizations this leads to a promotion because they seem important for having so many employees. They create a role model for other less effective leaders. As they hire managers to work for them, they hire those that add people as fast as possible regardless of value production. Now they’ve created 200 jobs, at a cost of 30. But their emergent doppelgängers have formed 10 of them with 20 people, contributing -30 jobs as well. Now there are 400 created jobs, but -60 net jobs.
Eventually the company is overrun with empire builders. It’s a big company. There are a few highly profitable cash cow teams that are extremely competitive to get into and are largely left alone. The profits though of the entire enterprise are flat and inline with peers of similar size. Headcount makes the comping look like a giant of industry. But it’s half the size it could be if there had been focus on creating new and better value.
In my experience this is why Amazon employs nearly 2 million people and is hyperbolic in its growth over such a long time. While empire building certainly exists there is a lot of process to control for it. Hiring (generally) is well metered, and leaders (sometimes) are rewarded for their dynamism in business growth (not always, YMMV). It adds new businesses constantly and a lot (not all!) businesses do pretty well and if they don’t get shut down and people reassigned.
Google, well, listen. It’s got great benefits and the managers have some impressive empires with high salaries and a stable of smart people to tally up for their biography. But there are only a few successful businesses and god bless you if you can name one that’s launched in the last 10 years. But it is killing them.
Many companies don’t have the luxury of a wildly profitable cash cow like Google. They get overrun and whither away, sometimes really fast.
That’s how it’s like cancer. Not literal cancer, and cancer is a horrible disease not to make light of, but empire building represses job growth over the long term in exchange for rapid short term growth that ultimately kills the host entirely.
I don't disagree with most of what you've written, but to set the record straight:
> In my experience this is why Amazon employs nearly 2 million people and is hyperbolic in its growth over such a long time.
Amazon employs millions of people to staff their warehouses, not to write software.
From their 2021 report, of their 1.1 million employees, 760 thousand were "laborers & helpers". That doesn't even count the managers for those hundreds of thousands of employees (probably a good chunk of the 62 thousand "first/mid officials & mgrs"), customer service, etc. (Or temps / contractors, if that's fueling the "2 million" figure you cited -- their latest earnings report indicated they had 1.5 million employees.)
Actually not true - it’s mostly grocery store employees. But that’s my point entirely - not that Amazon would employ 2mm software engineers but that Amazon created enough value that it could scale to millions of employees each of whom are marginally contributing. A person stocking shelves or packaging boxes is a person with a job that creates value. The software engineers being deployed smartly created enough value in a virtuous cycle to allow Amazon to productively employ millions of people.
(And yes my 2mm is net of non full time employees while the I9 population is 1.5mm)
If as a book seller they had built empires they would be struggling against Barnes and noble still.
The issue is that if the manager had grown the team in a way that grew revenues and value they manager could have created more than 20 roles in the entire organization. Sometimes the manager with 5 engineers and a strong vision can create enough value to hire hundreds or thousands of people throughout the company.
The manager who empire builds often creates negative value. So they create jobs for 20 people. But these jobs contribute nothing. Someone’s work in the org went to pay for those 20 jobs, and they got sucked into a black hole. Worse they require support, interact throughout the company, distract from real valuable work. In the end they contribute negative value, and the manager employed 20 people at the cost of 3 people’s jobs that could have been created but never were, their employment cost -23 people’s worth of value and contributed zero.
Now in many organizations this leads to a promotion because they seem important for having so many employees. They create a role model for other less effective leaders. As they hire managers to work for them, they hire those that add people as fast as possible regardless of value production. Now they’ve created 200 jobs, at a cost of 30. But their emergent doppelgängers have formed 10 of them with 20 people, contributing -30 jobs as well. Now there are 400 created jobs, but -60 net jobs.
Eventually the company is overrun with empire builders. It’s a big company. There are a few highly profitable cash cow teams that are extremely competitive to get into and are largely left alone. The profits though of the entire enterprise are flat and inline with peers of similar size. Headcount makes the comping look like a giant of industry. But it’s half the size it could be if there had been focus on creating new and better value.
In my experience this is why Amazon employs nearly 2 million people and is hyperbolic in its growth over such a long time. While empire building certainly exists there is a lot of process to control for it. Hiring (generally) is well metered, and leaders (sometimes) are rewarded for their dynamism in business growth (not always, YMMV). It adds new businesses constantly and a lot (not all!) businesses do pretty well and if they don’t get shut down and people reassigned.
Google, well, listen. It’s got great benefits and the managers have some impressive empires with high salaries and a stable of smart people to tally up for their biography. But there are only a few successful businesses and god bless you if you can name one that’s launched in the last 10 years. But it is killing them.
Many companies don’t have the luxury of a wildly profitable cash cow like Google. They get overrun and whither away, sometimes really fast.
That’s how it’s like cancer. Not literal cancer, and cancer is a horrible disease not to make light of, but empire building represses job growth over the long term in exchange for rapid short term growth that ultimately kills the host entirely.