Self preservation takes over at that point, and the bureaucratic org starts prioritizing its own survival over anything else. Product works instead becomes defensive operations, decision making slows, and innovation starts being perceived as a risk instead of a benefit.
The bureaucracy crew will win, they are playing the real game, everybody else is wasting effort on doing things like engineering.
The process is inevitable, but whatever. It is just part of our society, companies age and die. Sometimes they course correct temporarily but nothing is permanent.
I also think on this topic specifically there is so much labor going into low/no ROI projects and it's becoming obvious. That's just like my opinion though, should Meta even be inventing AI or just leveraging other AI products? I think that's likely an open question in their Org - this may be a hint to their latest thoughts on it.
(0) The only thing that matters is the budget.
(1) Beauraracies only grow, never shrink. You can only control the growth rate.
HR had completed many hours of meetings and listening sessions and had chosen to ... rename the HR department to some stupid new name.
It was like a joke for the movie Office Space, but too stupid to put in the film because nobody would believe it.
It’s amazing how process and internal operations will just eat up a company.
It's often possible to get promoted by leading "large efforts" where large is defined more or less by headcount. So if a hot new org has unlimited HC budget all the incentives push managers to complicate things as much as possible to create justification for more heads. Good for savvy mangers, bad for the company and overall effort. My impression is this is what happened at Meta's AI org, and VR/AR before that.