It’s not you, it’s role duplication

"Hey, it's not you, it's role duplication"

^New Breakup justification used by Tesla et al.

What do you think? Are there really that many people who are sitting around with nothing to do at these companies? And how the heck did they get hired if there's no work for them?

From my experience, there are two reasons why a company would over hire so much that they need to turn to layoffs (excluding m&a):
1) Hired ahead of revenue that did not come / product line that never went to market
2) Hired employees expecting turnover (usually seen in companies with either high turnover OR stack ranking/culling of the bottom 10-15%)
Bonus third reason: ego-driven hiring. Exec stacks team because they're more comfortable working with large teams or for the ego boost of overseeing large teams.

HR Brew seems to think that HR & Finance can help keep this hiring in check by determining if a plan is too bullish and pushing back though here's the thing.

We all know bullish headcount plans are too bullish.

We all know it's nutso to try to add 40K jobs in 2 years (as Tesla has done), not only from the perspective of hiring 40K people but also onboarding and incorporating them into the company.

Though hiring managers are putting these plans together based on the business goals they're being asked to meet. And maybe the issue isn't that HR and Finance approved an impossible hiring plan (honestly we all know it's usually a "disagree and commit" moment), but perhaps it's that the company approved an impossible or unrealistic business plan that we now need to scramble to try to achieve.