Yeah, it feels like the system created all these jobs because it could afford to support all that deadweight, but most of those people were not creating value; they were not contributing to the company's success so much as merely mooching off of it.
Also, the centralization of media put this effect into hyperdrive. Successful, high exposure companies were drowning in money and so they could just throw 100 engineers at each tiny problem and it wouldn't materially affect their bottom line. They also didn't care much whether an employee was doing their job efficiently, so long as they met basic objectives... Which wasn't hard to do when you have so many people in the team and each person is responsible for a tiny piece.
Many people could be counter-productive in the long run, they were productive enough to meet their short-term OKRs and so they were left alone but their rushed work set the project up for long term pain... Often it's impossible to trace back issues to specific individuals... In software development, it's trivial to introduce massive technical debt while meeting or even blowing past short-term objectives. Someone who is literally killing the project might appear to be a top performer... They may be promoted before any problems become apparent... Kind of like a bad civil engineer who builds an amazing looking bridge and is celebrated for years until the bridge suddenly collapses because the foundations turned out to be poorly designed. By that point they've already been promoted several times, maybe already retired and they can claim that the collapse was caused by incorrect construction practices or bad maintenance work performed later. However, in software, it's much worse because you can't just point to a single incorrect formula or calculation. Failure is usually the result of many bad decisions.
Also, the centralization of media put this effect into hyperdrive. Successful, high exposure companies were drowning in money and so they could just throw 100 engineers at each tiny problem and it wouldn't materially affect their bottom line. They also didn't care much whether an employee was doing their job efficiently, so long as they met basic objectives... Which wasn't hard to do when you have so many people in the team and each person is responsible for a tiny piece.
Many people could be counter-productive in the long run, they were productive enough to meet their short-term OKRs and so they were left alone but their rushed work set the project up for long term pain... Often it's impossible to trace back issues to specific individuals... In software development, it's trivial to introduce massive technical debt while meeting or even blowing past short-term objectives. Someone who is literally killing the project might appear to be a top performer... They may be promoted before any problems become apparent... Kind of like a bad civil engineer who builds an amazing looking bridge and is celebrated for years until the bridge suddenly collapses because the foundations turned out to be poorly designed. By that point they've already been promoted several times, maybe already retired and they can claim that the collapse was caused by incorrect construction practices or bad maintenance work performed later. However, in software, it's much worse because you can't just point to a single incorrect formula or calculation. Failure is usually the result of many bad decisions.