And this is why you do "ghost employee" audits. In a past career I used to work in the Controller's office for one of the Big 3 auto companies. One day, I was sent some bullshit email that I needed to do about 100 audits including "ghost employee audit" and check a box on a web form that all were complete. For shits and giggles, I decided to take it seriously. I altavista'd "ghost employee audit" and learned it is a reverse recon of the payroll system.

I did the audit by making every manager certify a list of employees. I found two employees that none claimed. One dude was well known within the plant and fixed any broken motors. No one had heard of the other guy. I convinced the payroll clerk to just stop paying the other person. He got pissed, and eventually tried to get a union rep, but the union decided not to rep him.

It turns out this "ghost employee" had collected over a million dollars in salary and OT, yet not worked in about a decade.

I asked about an award for the savings, but I was shot down because the union didn't want to let it out that they didn't rep a guy, and the company didn't want it known the ghost employee audits weren't actually being done.

In the end, I realized I was rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic, and switched careers by becoming a programmer. Haven't looked back since.

It's worth noting that a lot of the apps that Facebook "killed off" (iLike, Social Reader, RockYou, Zynga games, etc.) really did detract from the user experience. Let's take Washington Post's Social Reader as a case study. You had to authorize the app in order to read the articles (that were often loaded with linkbait-y titles), and any time you did read (or click on) an article it automatically shared it with all of your Facebook friends. Zynga is another example; I'm sure I wasn't the only one constantly bombarded with invites to Whateverville. I had to unfriend some people to avoid them, because there was no way to turn them off.

It felt like these apps had found a hack that was taking advantage of the platform, but really this was just the result of the platform being poorly designed itself. The selling point for developers who picked up on it was, "You can make everyone who uses you spam all of their Facebook friends." Unfortunately spam, especially when it's coming from your friends, works like a charm. Facebook eventually had to stop allowing that before it let itself turn into a MySpace filled with little widgets.

Facebook's real problem wasn't just that it wanted to own everything itself, but that it didn't build the platform the right way in the first place.

I worked in a government setting where there was an entire unit of about 12 people called "the island of misfit toys".

They basically took inept employees that were too dumb to give real work to do (but not dumb enough to successfully terminate) and put them into a "Security" unit that allowed salaries to funded by some special source. As far as I could tell, their job was to assign password-reset permissions to "key users" in the field and do some sort of audit function. One of my interns automated their jobs in about 2 weeks when they all retired. They spent most of their time filing discrimination complaints about each other.

The Director was brilliant about it, he'd nominate them for awards for exceeding their KPIs or meeting project milestones, or some other nonsense, which allowed him to expand the group and put them in a separate room.

In the Fortune 500 space, I saw a similar behavior, but for a different purpose... the company did stack-ranking with 5-10% annual layoffs, and the Director-level people would scheme and fight to collect the most inept people possible. When it came time for their unit to be culled, these people would basically serve as fodder for the layoff. It was bizarre to watch.