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.
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.