Seems like there must be a hell of a lot of very expensive “knowledge workers” cashing checks and contributing nothing to the field.
Managing large amounts of people is hard, and there are limits on how many can be effectively coordinated on a project. Therefore the larger the company, the taller and more complex the bureaucracy stack becomes, and as a company adds unbounded amounts of headcount, teams naturally reach their size limit and must fracture, adding another manager. Once the first management layer grows beyond a certain size, additional tier-2 managers must be added to coordinate the tier-1 managers.
Soon you wind up with a company like Meta, with thousands upon thousands of managers who are only managing other managers. Each of those people, being several steps up the management career ladder, are probably making well into six figure incomes. The on-the-ground employees doing the actual work probably account for a relatively small portion of that $13B.
It's an indictment not of the SE field, but of the current version of corporate structure: - managers valued (at least partially) by how many people they manage, so are incentivized to add unnecessary headcount - managers, PMs, and Tech Leads are rated favorably for driving a visible project forward by some measurable metric, but not necessarily for finishing projects or for necessary-but-unsexy work like bug fixing, reducing tech debt, or using political capital to stop wasteful projects before they start. This incentivizes the creation and abandonment of projects, or the churn of forever-projects that keep getting handed off to the next cohort to remake in whatever fashion they believe will the get themselves promoted, on and on forever.
This came straight from the very top at Facebook.
You think Zuck needs to fully specify what he wants the company to build?
Or should a company be able to set out a goal - “make extremely compelling VR/AR experiences for consumers and businesses” and provide the funding and the mandate to hire the best and the brightest… and reasonably expect that $10+ billion later to have something remotely interesting to show for it?
They have managers for that:
"A product manager is a visionary who guides new product ideas from an initial concept to a full-blown product launch. Along the way, we collaborate with world-class engineers and designers..."
(Pulled from Meta's jobs page)