For what it's worth, this isn't unique to unicorns. Almost company successful enough to get to the scale of tens of thousands of employees likely has huge amounts of waste within it. The situation you describe of niche projects being scrapped after several person-years of effort had been invested, incomprehensible management hierarchy, and no coherent strategy perfectly matches my first job out of college, a year at Sprint in 1999. Me and two other new hires spent a year doing next to nothing on a team of 20+ building a complicated Java service with a purpose I never understood, but which had been going on for about a year, with half the team made up of contractors. Pretty sure I never wrote any actual code, though I did have to fill out time sheets every week. I had two managers, neither of whom I ever talked to. After a year, I got a 15% raise and a promotion. Then soon after I found another job and quit, our project got cancelled, but everyone on the team just got moved to other teams doing similar "work".