Working in a large company, 50-80% of the work seems like bullshit but often plausibly necessary because the projects are large and complex and there are a lot of coordination headwinds across so many teams with large adverse effects of building the wrong thing or getting things wrong at scale. So you have a lot of meetings, a lot of planning, and a lot of middle management. It's pretty easy to go too far in the wrong direction though where you can see a 1:1 ratio or even worse of administrative/managerial overhead where a project might have only 1-2 actual engineers doing work but a heavy dose of project/program/product managers, 'leadership', or other overhead. Basically this is the ratio you have to watch, ideally you have <=10% overhead, 20-30% is maybe workable but as soon as you have 50%+ overhead it's pretty obvious something is wrong.
If you have a highly profitable company you can go a really long way. Stability breeds instability... and any sufficiently complex system is operating at the limit of some instability.
To take Google as an example (cuz I think it's actually not a bad company and certainly quite profitable, where I used to know a lot of people in different areas) over 80% of income is ads and 60% of the total is search ads. There's YouTube(ads), Gmail(ads), Android (ads and Play Fees), and Cloud (fees that might cover costs?). But I'd bet that 80% of the people are working on 20% of the profits. Certainly, I'm familiar with the hardware side and that is flat out a loss leader. Don't even get started with the Bets. The last 20-30% (of engineers!) probably produce absolutely nothing that any customer will every see, or are producing net losses of the company over the lifetime of the product.
It's hard to get real motivated about even a product you make when the company considers it a loss maker... that makes it the plaything of executives. Because, whatever the folks at Meta may be capable of or want to do with VR, there's really just one customer who's last name starts with Z. It's just politics at that point and pleasing the managers since the easiest way to higher profits is to kill the whole division.
Of course VCs face some of the same issues, but at least there you have a target customer (maybe the wrong) and a product (maybe the wrong one), and you know your work isn't BS when you're profitable post IPO.
