The organizational function you describe where departments become self-serving, empire building, and forget that they need to produce something with ROI for the company, felt rampant during the 2010s.

Then the easy money stopped and those companies were forced to look at the ROI of different departments. Entire initiatives or departments were getting cut as soon as budgets stopped growing and executives had to check the reality of what was working for the company and what had become a jobs program.

It’s really frustrating that layoffs are the corrective action. I know a lot of people who were good employees doing arguable good work, but who got hired into departments doing dumb things.

As for junior PMs: I’d be ecstatic if they arrived with a pure profit motive. Lately they arrive full of ideas from Reddit, Twitter, podcasts, and books where they think the only product that matters is building their resume to get the next job. Half of them are min-maxing their effort to resume appeal ratio with every decision. Possibly anecdotally but the junior PMs I’ve had to work with lately are also very obviously doing variations of overemployment where they’re either working on their friends’ startup or just blatantly taking multiple remote jobs and being unavailable half the time. I don’t know why PM roles attract the worst of this, but’s it seems to be the target role for people who want to abuse our remote openings. I should note that great PMs are a massive boost to a team, it’s just getting harder to find them.