It's truly insane how much the success of leadership is measured by the size of recursive reports. It's as asinine as the "use it or lose it" budgeting strategy.

If one of the criteria for your success as a manager is “managed a team of size X”, it stands to reason that you would want to increase that X as much as possible.

Yep, the existence of the incentive is undeniable, the question is why is this an incentive when it leads to cancerous growth within organisations, and is generally detached from any specific business outcome.

Taking into account what Docusign are doing, they probably need legal in retainer for every single of the 180 countries they sell to. How many languages do they need to support in the software? And don't forget sales. Stuff adds add quickly. Then, remember, productivity is sub-linear with headcount.

An internal fiefdom is something you expect at IBM. Lunacy if DocuSign is allowing that to happen.

Why is IBM special in this regard? Fiefdoms appear in any organization larger than a few dozen people.

IBM is a place where people go and rot in a cubicle for 40 years and then retire. Fiefdoms are a natural consequences. Companies like DocuSign have turnover and growth such that it becomes somewhat more difficult to build fiefdoms.

They're everywhere at most companies, sometimes in non obvious ways.

For instance, marketing sometimes has its own developer / engineering teams, rather than running their work through the engineering org. Thats an example.