Are they overstaffed due to overhiring, or are they overstaffed due to the changing macro-economic picture which has derailed growth?

There are strong incentives to tell someone to downsize rather than staying the same size. Investors love the occasional human sacrifice, and you can always achieve a short-term productivity increase by reducing the denominator (headcount), at least until real metrics start showing the qualitative decline that almost inevitably follows. And then you can sneakily recruit some new suckers.

In this case it's Marc Andreessen. He's not on the payroll. He is the payroll.

I can name a ton of bullshit jobs at my company. Heck, I know whole departments that shouldn't exist. But they do because some management consultant said we needed it to improve our attractiveness to investors or if we IPO or something like that. But they will cut the people that actually do the work.

This.

It can get even worse

If I lose my job, I won't be able to stay here, I'll get deported, I might lose my marriage as well, I'll lose everything in life

And the company owner knows this and oh boy is he having fun with that knowledge. So they scream their lungs out at me, insulting me to my face. What am I going to do about it? Quit? Complain and get fired?

Fuck all this

Do you work for the same company I do. We just laid off our senior dev ops manager and moved the team to our India office.

Very similar issue here... Scrum masters that invite themselves to every meeting to run them, but are not able to contribute meaningfully in any way. I guess it's not just my company that does agile wrong

I'm fortunate to have an effective scrum master. She knows the products will enough to properly interface with our different stage holders. The amount of shit that doesn't make it to us because she's essentially our firewall to the customers, is astounding.

That said, there are plenty of other business decisions being made that are rapidly leading to a team wide brain drain. The top brass is so out of touch with reality, and they make major decisions on that ignorance without consulting anyone that knows anything. It's also turned into a boys club at the top, so there's no individual accountability, just yes men.

That's it? She's not involved in planning or anything? Even when I was a dev scrum leader, we'd plan out every sprint as well longer term planning. It was surprisingly time consuming and we had to budget less dev time for me so I could handle the scrum duties.

Glad I didn't have to do that shit anymore.

In our case, when you look at the skills needed to keep our services running, it's single failure points all the way down. At best, only nearly so.

There's always a mad dash to get leave requests in for Christmas as soon as possible, since the latecomers almost always get refused due to thin coverage.

Yeah, it usually means overstaffed with too expensive workers.

My whole career was like this until I moved to the public sector. Now, I wouldn't say we are over staffed, but my team of 3 has about 2.5 people worth of work, such that if one person is out we can still handle everything, if two people are out it gets stressful.

By comparison it feels like I am exhaling for the first time in 25 years.

Add onto that, the fact that upper management is 4 or 5 people deep as well. Basically more management than workers.

In 30 years of employment, I've never had a job where any department at any company I've been with seemed properly staffed to say nothing of overstaffed.

I worked for a company which "prepared for a growth spurt" by hiring +10% of the total workforce in sales specialized for an upcoming anticipated opportunity. Then the opportunity was delayed and the extra 10% literally were twiddling their thumbs with nothing to do. Then the opportunity went sour, very difficult sales compared to what was anticipated, but instead of backing down, they did a 10% RIF across the board. I left voluntarily after that, along with about 10% of the survivors of the RIF. Big talk of "back to work, business as usual, if you're still here we love you and will never let you go." Less than another year later, another 10% RIF.

And it’s not even a lack of revenue. Profits are still coming in the billions, it’s just that they have to keep it going up every quarter to keep the shareholders happy.

The goal is zero employees and 100% profit.