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I was speaking very generally. To staff their military, administrative posts and sensitive staff like harem guards, they used slaves who at least early on could not pass down property for one reason or another. Some were physically made eunuchs, Janissaries early on were forbidden to marry, etc. Over time these restrictions broke down as the slave class gained power. Point is, the Ottomans had a pipeline of carefully selected, above average slaves directly owned by the Sultan and educated at great expense for personal loyalty and professional competence. That's the sort of selection process you need to staff an empire, but it isn't stable long term.
My point is that all these societies are trying to solve the same problem. You need competent and relatively low-corruption staff, preferably not from the existing elites and preferably not that can pass on anything they do accumulate to any family. How you get there is any combination of sterilization, religion, legal restriction etc. It often changes over time, as everyone wants to make a little something to pass on to their kids, and no system is totalizing enough to prevent all offspring. It just needs to be a high enough rate of churn in this administrative class to keep it from becoming its own political entity. Of course, this never works long term, and isn't in our case or that of the Ottomans.
But it is a problem that has to be solved to even have an empire past the lifetime of one great man. This is what Alexander and Ghengis Khan lacked. The jump from feudally-organized personal loyalty of military commanders to ability-selected and specially trained professional bureaucrats. This is why Rome, Egypt and China created lasting civilizations, while Alexander and Ghengis changed out the CEO for a generation. There was no underlying structure loyal to the state itself.
Note that Orwell's most famous book was about how this could be made stable.
Democracy complicates this because it gives this administrative class far more political power than it should have, especially when it's universal (also, "all bureaucrats are female regardless of their actual genitals" has a lot of very interesting implications, the least interesting of which trivially explains the politics of that class). The US made an attempt to strip bureaucrats of political power- that's why DC isn't a state- but it didn't go anywhere near far enough. Stripping all government workers of the right to vote in relevant elections would likely improve any Western democracy significantly.
That would be pointless, as they'd simply become government contractors with the same incentives. Besides, it's less the individual workers and more their unions (and similarly, NGOs) that enable small organized groups to wrest control of their collective power.
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