> Badly managed BigCorps are overstaffed 3x (or more).
I never knew what a corporate intranet was for until I worked at a huge company. It's for clicking around on, going back and forth, when you have nothing else to do but need to look busy.
Bingo. I find that limiting headcount is a great forcing function for only doing what's important. The classic example is Google making X different chat apps. That doesn't happen unless a company is severely overstaffed.
To me that really just screams lazy and incompetent management. Being overstaffed is just a coincidence. A good mgmt structure would have prioritized that roadmap and gotten the cats herded to work towards a singular goal/chat app. I say this as a "cat" myself who has to be reminded to not get distracted by the next shiny thing.
I'd say it's not. But causality is the reverse of the GP's.
Being overstaffed is a consequence of not prioritizing the work. Either the staff grows until the important things get done, or the organization shrinks because the important stuff doesn't get done.
If there is insufficient manpower, it is often because they are building things they shouldn't. At least this was my experience.