> How do you "accidentally" hire more people than you can afford?

Making predictions is difficult, especially about the future.

So it's not really an accident. They meant to hire those people, they were just bad at forecasting. To me, those are separate issues.

You expect to make more revenue than you actually do.

So you didn't "accidentally" hire people. You did it with a lack of foresight. To me, that's different.

Saying you accidentally hired people makes it sound softer than it really is. If Raytheon or Boeing hired 2,000 people ahead of a defense contract they were sure they'd get, and didn't that wouldn't be an "accident." That would be poor planning (counting your eggs before they hatch kind of thing.)

Either way, I don't really care either way about Zynga. I don't think I've ever played their games, but at the same time I'm not hoping they fail.

You are a middle manager. Do you say "bob in the other department hired 5 people, so I guess I'll stick with the three I have"? Nope. You go straight to your VP and say a rival VP just got five guys, where's mine. If hiring is decentralized and no one is concerned about costs you end up growing exponential.

That sounds like what would happen at Strawman, Inc. I've worked at a bunch of companies, big and small, and have never seen hiring justified like that.

Now, getting people and teams transferred once they are hired? That's a whole different story.

What do you propose caused Zynga management to vastly overhire and conduct layoffs?

They expected faster growth than what actually happened. It's possible that the CEO approved each individual hire and they still could have overhired.

Then the VP is not doing his/her job correctly. Someone needs to be aware of the budget for salaries and be responsible for ensuring it isn't exceeded (and held accountable if it is).

It's also very backwards (government-level!) thinking to be playing the hiring quota game like that. I'd much rather hire a few members in a kick-ass team than participate in a headcount battle.

I agree with your statements, but those are arguments about how it should be, and not how it is.

Seems to me that they need the level of developers they have, because they've said they are moving their whole division to India.

That's not a mass redundancy, that's a mass replacement.