Work expands to “utilize resources”

Parkinson’s law says “Work expands to fill the time available to fill it”. I see a slight variant of it in the wild. This version is “Work is invented because we have to “utilize resources”.

At a startup, once you get past the product market fit stage, your revenue starts growing quickly. Anticipating more growth, you think that adding more people means you can add more features quickly. You go on a hiring spree. Three months into it, you realize that there is isn’t enough work for all the people that you hired.
Yet, you will justify your hiring (sunk cost fallacy) and try to “create” work because you have to “utilize” the resources at your disposal. You will also run parallel streams of work for the same reason. The communication overhead will slow your company down and you will hire more people to fix it. You suddenly realize that you got so much more done when you were a small team. Then one day, the competition will eat you or you will be bought out for much smaller amount than you thought you would. You will then keep blaming the “bad hires” for this all your life.

In an “enterprise”, it is easy to hire more people because there is a “budget” for your product line. Also, you to need “utilize” the budget by the end of the year (otherwise, you get a smaller budget next year). Like the startup founder, you will think that adding more people will make you faster. You will hire more people. Like the startup, it will make you slower. Since you were already slow to begin with, you will not feel it as much as the startup founder. Company politics dictates that you look good to grow your career, so you push it under the carpet. Then one day, someone at the top decides that your product line is not adding value and you get shut down. You will either be fired or move on to yet another product.

It is over forty years, since the “Mythical man month” came out. Yet, muscle memory for “scaling/growing” seems to be to “throw people at the problem”. Instead, can we take a step back and think about the bigger picture and hire people only when there is “sustainable work” planned beforehand ?