I'm surprised that proportion is even doing work.

Coming from A16Z, that's rich.

There is a party policy to make life hard for small business, probably because those small businesses are harder to control politically than giant monopolies. Obama reforms made health insurance basically unfeasible for tiny businesses. This pressure continues with IRS $600 transaction reporting threshold. The new IRS rule that disallows writing off programmers salary expenses the same year as research and development and makes them amortizable over years only is another blow. Same goes for tightening of the constructor classification, pushing tiny businesses towards classifying their programmers as employees versus contractors.

The fact that those giant monopolies have menagerial class basically doing nothing is not anything new. In the Soviet Union for the sake of universal employment there was also an entire white collar class that did absolutely nothing. This was pointed out by James Burnham in his book The Managerial Revolution, which describes the more recent development of Marxism https://books.google.es/books/about/The_Managerial_Revolution.html

The political bias of Google Bard for example, is not surprising after reading this book.

This isn't only Google. Every big company's white collar staff do no real work.

I think everyone who worked in a large company would have seen this play out in real time and feel the same way, I think tech is just the latest example and the one that has pushed it quite far because it gets so much outsized investment based on growth, and growth is tied to hiring and staffing up

Eventually you get big enough, and you no longer need to be lean, you knock out the competition and no one is threatening your position so you can continue to bloat, I'm sure some of the layoffs we;ve seen is in the bs job category though, they would likely be the first to go, but some might have their claws deep in management and would sooner see core fuctions leave than their bs department lol

Sometimes paying smart people not to work for your competitors is a strategic move.