I was a software engineer in the Soviet Union. To buy your family something to eat (like milk, or cheese) you should skip work and spend an hour or more standing in lines at a grocery store. I used a different strategy: work late and around 8 pm there were no lines at you could still buy sour milk, bread and canned fish in tomato sauce. I survived on this and was pretty happy cause I liked my job. But remember the requirement: no kids...
Thesis:
Employing people who barely provide any value is no good for anyone in the long run.
Argument:
Full employment was always the primary goal of all communist countries, so (state) companies were practically required to employ everyone on the job market.
(My comment was: Plain, simple truth.) The argument continues:
Many of those people had little to do and so, when people got their salaries at the end of the month, there wasn't that much stuff in the stores to buy with it, as the companies didn't have much of an output.
(My comment was: Plain, simple truth again. My story: just an illustration what my "living experience" as a software engineer was in these conditions. Basically: if your do not want to spend a lot of time in lines, you can't get milk. Not enough milk was produced to cover all the money paid to all the workers. Only sour milk to those who prefer to spend their time working.)
The app is needed, so we hire people to make app. We got a bunch of designers and developers to develop UI in a team.
But OH NO!, WE DID A GOOD JOB! EVERYTHING WORKS AND IS EASILY EXTENSIBLE!
What next? There isn't enough work on the new stuff ? We just add UI for a feature other team develops every so often, that's not enough work to go by.
And, more importantly, MANAGER CAN'T MAKE THEMSELVES LOOK GOOD when doing only maintenance and not delivering features.
What to do, what to do? I know ? Let's rewrite perfectly functioning UI again! Let's fuck around with stuff that works fine already. Make it look "modern" while we're at it. Use new framework so we can't reuse that much code. That will keep the devs busy and manager getting bonuses!
Look at how much the employees of SV/FAANG companies donate to politicians and which ones. It's not hard to see the money laundering going on.