> In an efficient market, why would profit-focused companies employ a bunch of people who by their own admission aren’t doing anything valuable?
There are lots of reasons for bullshit tasks, I found. And let's call it tasks, not jobs. Because a job is something regular that pays a monthly income, and there ARE certainly complete bullshit jobs!
One reason, as mentioned here, is process. Everything needs a process, so that it's clear (or rather that it's unclear, but more about that later) who's responsible, what needs to be done, and that there is an objective checklist to show that something is done when it's done. It sounds stupid but it makes complex things work. In a relatively big company for this chair topic a number of separate, independent units, who might not even know each others existence, need to cooperate on a task that is split in organisational, financial and temporal terms. That is hard. But with a process it's possible to get finished at some point.
The second thing is that each company that is still alive had a time of growth and a time when they where stuck. When you are stuck, you can't just fire everybody. And you can't allow people to just browse Facebook all day. So what do you do? You create bullshit tasks. That keeps the juice flowing. And if an interesting, profitable opportunitiy comes up you still have people, orgs, etc setup so you can start approaching it. It also makes sense, to some degree.
The third one I can immediately think about might come as shock to some people. We grow up with the believe that things are equal and supposed to be fair. Truth is, the world sucks and is an unfair place. Therefore power hierarchies really exist, even in the seemingly most open places. Even at the cool company you heard about and really want to work at. And what do people do who achieved some powers in these virtual pyramids? They create obstructions for the people below them so they can't follow them upstairs and maybe even take their seat. Bullshit processes, bullshit tasks, and bullshit jobs help greatly with that. This might look inefficient, but in fact might actually be the most efficient system in existence. Because it works. It worked in the stone age, in the medieval times, in modern dictatorships, and also (sadly) in modern democracies. Like the invisible hand that governs the resource allocation in free markets, power structures are always there and make things work. Maybe not like you want it, but you are also not at the top of the pyramid, right?
Alright, that's what I can think off. They do valuable things, just that the value is not obvious to you nor is the value shared with you. That's why it looks like bullshit.