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Notes -
This is about layoffs in tech and what they underscore about modern economy.
https://blog.interviewing.io/how-much-have-2022-layoffs-affected-engineers-vs-other-departments-we-dug-into-the-data-to-find-out/
This passage feels obvious. Of course companies will let go those employees first who contribute little to the bottom line. Of course companies will hold onto their critical resources--engineers and salespeople in this case--until the very worst moment.
But underneath this is a statement about how many bullshit jobs are there in our economy. Jobs that are merely simple busywork. Jobs that exist solely as a way to redistribute the fruits of capitalism from those who have found a way to way to produce for society and those who didn't. It's basically a giant social contract about providing for a rather large part of society that would not otherwise be able to sustain itself.
If anything, this speaks of how deep our humanism runs. Instead of sawing off the sickly branch, we embrace it with care, doing so in a way that doesn't over-infringe on the patient's dignity (Consider how powerful a mark of status it is to provide for the weak and poor--now this status-marker has been democratized).
Thus we learn something practical: don't take anything HR says or does too seriously. They play an unpopular, minor role in the fabric of a company, relegated to the equivalent of keeping the litter box clean: ensuring legal compliance, tackling on/off-boarding paperwork, and organizing company celebrations. That, and be wary of HR departments that seem to outgrow their function. A fat, active HR department is a sign that a company isn't allocating its funds efficiently. Or that it usurps power from more important departments, eg. the power to design and run the hiring process (they should only take care of the mechanical parts; the candidate qualification process should be in the hands of subject-matter experts). Either way, it's a bad sign.
I actually agree with you that these jobs are probably chaff that owe their existence to higher-ups taking their eye off the ball during times of plenty; there's less pressure to eye the budget like a hawk and make your department a lean mean economic machine when the Line Goes Up is already firmly in the green, which allows all manner of bloat and pathology to creep in.
However, in the interest of Devil's Advocacy:
Others have pointed out something similar, and I'll add to the chorus: it might be the case that having lots of HR people really is business-optimal in times of plenty. When the market falls, your engineers are happy to just have a job at all and don't need much coddling. When the market is rising, and engineers have many options to jump ship, it could be in the company's genuine interests to have a huge HR pool managing their perks / expenses / work retreats / Casual Pizza Party Fridays / etc etc.
Alternatively, we could take a more cynical view that HR is a response to the Administrative State's bullshit legal codes and have it still make sense. Being a stickler for the letter if legal compliance is more important in a bull market than in a bear market because having legal monkey wrenches thrown at your company that slow you down, carries a higher opportunity cost during good times of high turnover than it does during bad times of low turnover. Also, people are more likely to try to sue you when your quarterly reports say "We're loaded" rather than "We've got nothing in the bank to pay settlements". A greater desire to avoid government fines and bad PR therefore incentivises a larger HR department at the zenith of the business cycle than at the nadir.
This is an interesting take, but my experience is the opposite. HR don't coddle, they suffocate. All the bullshit training, the blizzard of emails, the forms, the surveys the requirements. Giving each manager $100 per month per employee to take their team out to dinner is low overhead. Just paying people more is zero overhead. In times of plenty and times of little, I want HR to nothing more than payroll.
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