Some variant of this seems to happen to organizations after they reach a certain size of people. I used to work at a startup that raised a massive round of funding and began a hiring spree. I joined one of the satellite offices shortly afterwards, excited and eager to get to work. What I found was that the vast majority of our 50-person office was more or less spinning the hamster wheel, so to speak. The work that needed to be done was parsed and diluted across so many people that there was hardly any work to fill a full 8-hour workday. I recall missing a day of work once and forgetting to notify my boss (I had a midterm and was likely in some sort of panic mode). The next day as I walked in he greeted me by saying, "Hey! Nice job yesterday." He wasn't being sarcastic either. The amount of work to do was so minimal that my boss forgot (or didn't even notice) that I wasn't at the office.

I've read some articles recently stating that Netflix and Facebook experience increases in traffic during traditional work hours. It's an interesting data point. I think most jobs don't need to exist. They exist for a variety of reasons: signaling (the company must signal growth), incompetence, inefficiency, etc.