If you just need someone for narrowly-scoped tasks like fixing specific bugs, it might be better to hire a contractor, so the role expectations can be well-defined and agreed to up front.

It’s pretty evil IMO to hire people as FTEs into such organizations when you are probably better off with consultants that are at least used to short term gigs.

Then there's the "unintentional" body farms that organize due to structural reasons of massive funding combined with labor structure dictated to support a massive enterprise. Within defense, almost all the major defense contractors like Northrop, Lockheed, General Dynamics, and maybe Palantir these days (the bar for hiring is higher overall there, but not quite the full story) fight for huge, bloated Pentagon budgets that resembles VC funding except with military officers as partners and minimum headcounts are usually specified in contract vehicles. You'll oftentimes see at least n PhDs on staff, m veterans, p program managers, etc. as competitive factors for getting a contract ahead of other companies because with too small of a company it's deemed a risk to the government (people do take vacation, get into accidents, etc.). While there's been some efforts to make the RFP process better aligned towards outcomes, everything I've heard since I left the community has not been encouraging.