To go from Sr. Manager to Director requires having experiencing managing managers who report to you. How do you get more middle managers? You hire more people.

How do you go from Sr. Manager to Manager, you manage a large team, and create a need to have your org have multiple managers.

So yes, lots of perverse incentives to grow your org so-as to grow your career.

This is the management equivalent of measuring developer productivity by the number of lines of code written.

I see that in places I've worked. I've always resisted growing my team's headcount as I've seen it break efficiency first hand. However I'm well aware it makes our team less noticed, and less attractive when other companies ask what's my current reporting count as a metric of how senior you are.

Right, so more efficiencies could free up resources to hire even more middle managers or administrative staff. It's only natural that well funded startups will have roles for "experience coordinator" or something. You think FAANG would have such a large headcount if they didn't have crazy margins?

There are some other tides working in the favor of bloated salaries and payrolls. One is the focus of "stakeholder capitalism". Most of the large companies are held by ETFs. The large banks that run the ETFs are less concerned about individual efficiencies of any one company (they own them all anyway), but are more interested in other things (green initiatives, social causes, etc). So the decisions being made at these companies are less about profit and more about servicing "stakeholders", be it their employees, the community, the environment. That's all fine, but it's difficult to track and hold executives responsible. A bloated staff is fine because you don't want to lay off employees. Or various money losing departments are okay because they're servicing the community.

If there's anything folks like more than reports, its money. Like the savings and goosed stock price from offshoring, especially "offshoring to local robots," which are even more reliable.

Counterpoint: if the company actually had good upper management, they will only let the mid level managers grow their team if it brings value to the company.

No org is perfect, but I keep seeing this take again and again and again, yet rarely any form of acknowledgment that it could be good for the company to incentivize proactively growing a team