At large organizations it is often the case that the amount of power you wield is determined by the number of employees that report to you. This creates an incentive to bring on new employees whenever you have the budget and to avoid layoffs of your people wherever possible. So even though Dan (the estimator) isn't really needed he still serves to increase some middle manager's power.

At organizations like this you'll often have "re-orgs" where a few people are laid off (relatively speaking) but the "managers that matter" (those with the most power) come out having the same number of people beneath them. It will seem completely arbitrary to the people at the bottom of the org chart why their boss's boss's boss changed but the truth is that it happened because that guy used his influence to finagle the org chart in such a way as to keep the same number of reports.

Yes, I've experienced this first hand. Also, during the latest re-organization, they decided to lay us off and replace us with outsourced workers since upper management thought this was cheaper. My entire department got hired by the exact outsourcing company, and a couple of weeks later it was business as usual. Only 3 times more expensive for the company...

That IS weird, indeed. Haven't come across that, especially for a smaller size company. On the other hand, it never seizes to amaze me the reasons people have for some decisions. Completely irrational. Most likely your boss had to answer to someone at the top, and if they were to find out your department had too much slack time, they'd cut his budget.

I started working in 1998. Fresh out of school, I had this romantic idea about jobs being places where you go to perform a specific set of predefined tasks. 15 years down the road I learned about the waste, the fluff, the inefficiency, the incompetence of some managers, the politics and the corporate speak. They never teach you those things in school...

Avoidance of budget cutting was something I saw every year working for a city agency. The entire budget had to be used up or else it would get cut back. My boss would divvy it up and ask each subordinate what they wanted to do with it. I usually upgraded or added to my computer equipment. It was kinda like Christmas every spring.

We had people who weren't entirely useless, but were paid an awful lot for the kind of work they did.

I've had multiple jobs like that. The funny thing is, after a while you can't ask for work TOO often, because management will find out your function isn't really needed, and they'll terminate you. Another thing I observed is that the person you're replacing apparently was always super busy with the job. Which makes me superhuman in productivity, or that person was probably keeping up the appearance of being busy. Probably the latter!

No no! They knew I didn't have any work to do - that's the scary thing. It was a small company (50 - 100 people) and the boss knew exactly how much work I had at any time. I had to sit at my desk and read a book. That was right. Offering to help other people was wrong. Unpaid leave? Also wrong.