There’s an uncomfortable truth hidden behind the glossy careers pages of big tech companies: most of their hiring isn’t driven by genuine necessity, but by abundance.

Companies like Google, Meta, or Amazon don’t add thousands of new hires every year because each employee is critically essential. They hire simply because they can afford to. Elon Musk illustrated this dramatically at Twitter—laying off 80% of the workforce had surprisingly little impact on the core product. In most tech companies, perhaps only 20% of employees work on truly vital, revenue-driving projects. Google’s search and ads make up the lion’s share of its revenue, yet only a fraction of its workforce is directly tied to these core areas. Meanwhile, entire teams work on projects that might never ship—projects that are less about necessity and more about optionality.

When companies grow sufficiently rich, hiring stops being about careful selection and becomes something closer to empire-building. It’s no longer about who you genuinely need, but rather about who you can afford.

Think of it like shopping at a supermarket. On a tight budget, you meticulously compare prices, check ingredients, and judge nutritional value. But if you have millions, you won’t bother looking carefully. You grab the most expensive items on the shelf, believing price correlates directly with quality—even if it often doesn’t. Big companies hire the same way. With abundant resources, they don’t thoroughly evaluate the necessity of each new hire. Instead, they hire expensive talent, assuming higher salaries automatically guarantee better results.

Hiring becomes a kind of strategic luxury. Managers don’t just expand teams to tackle workloads—they expand to signal their own status and pave the way for promotions. The number of people reporting to a manager usually determines that manager’s perceived value and salary within the organization. The head of a 200-person division has more influence, status, and earning potential than someone managing just 20, regardless of how many of those employees genuinely contribute to the company’s core success.

There’s also optionality at play. Wealthy companies treat hiring as venture capital bets: low-risk investments with potentially huge returns. Many hires are “hope it works” bets rather than carefully calculated moves. Occasionally, these speculative bets become game-changers—like Google’s early investment in AI—but most don’t pan out. When a company earns hundreds of billions annually, burning a billion dollars on speculative projects isn’t catastrophic—though the same spending would be ruinous for a startup. This mentality often results in highly-qualified people performing mundane tasks: PhDs labeling datasets, master’s degree holders managing routine operations—not because these roles demand such expertise, but because optimization for cost-effectiveness isn’t necessary.

Why should this matter to you? Because it breaks down a dangerous illusion: joining a prestigious tech giant doesn’t necessarily mean you’re indispensable, valuable, or even secure. History shows, especially vividly around economic downturns (such as the cycle around 2021), that these companies expand and contract largely due to macroeconomic factors like interest rates—not employee performance. When layoffs inevitably occur, the first casualties are often these “luxury hires,” employees whose roles were never central to the company’s essential success.

If you’re charting your career, particularly early on, understanding this is crucial. Prestige alone can be misleading. Often, the smarter move isn’t boarding the largest, most prestigious ship—but one where your work visibly affects the company’s trajectory. Seek roles clearly linked to core business outcomes. Find positions where your individual impact is tangible and measurable, not buried beneath layers of internal politics.