An organization grows large enough to need a significant amount of management, planning, training, etc. It hires managers, who do what at this point is useful work.
The organization grows by an order of magnitude. Your managers now have managers of their own – a lot of this is still useful work.
Your managers start to hire people to do administrative tasks for them, or lower-level management work. Plenty of this is just plain-old division of labor, but you start to get more potential for useless tasks.
The organization changes significantly over time. Restructures, shuttering departments, mergers, and the like. You wind up with vestigial parts of past organizational structures doing make work or marking time: bullshit jobs.
My guess is this is just poor planning. They think they have work to do in an area, so they hire someone for it. Turns out there’s much less work in that area than they thought, or they don’t follow through on really developing it, or they assign the new hire some minor tasks du jour and when they’re done the original project has never gotten off the ground.
I think it happens like this:
That’s probably what happened historically but nowadays I see even relatively small companies (100-200 people) create bullshit jobs.
My guess is this is just poor planning. They think they have work to do in an area, so they hire someone for it. Turns out there’s much less work in that area than they thought, or they don’t follow through on really developing it, or they assign the new hire some minor tasks du jour and when they’re done the original project has never gotten off the ground.