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1. They maintain and sell one of the largest relational databases.
2. They're the primary maintainer of one of the largest programming languages.
3. They do tons of HR/ERP type software.
4. They have a supply chain division (my company is a direct competitor, and we have 2000 employees--it's a drop in the bucket, but a few thousand here, a few thousand there and it starts to add up. Afaik, their supply chain org is bigger than ours).
5. Other things I probably don't know about.
Many of these things come with swarms of consultants who implement the software for companies that don't have any internal technical competency, which swells the number of workers by a lot.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not remotely a fan, I like to quote Bryan Cantrill's rant. However, they do a lot of things.
If I do my python right, from 2010-2020 they grew by 2.5% annually, from 2020 to 2025, they grew headcount by 3.7% annually.
After the layoffs, they'll apparently now have grown by 1.0% annually since 2020.
So yes, from 2021 to 2023, they had a huge spike, but overall, it's a net slowdown in growth relative to the 2010-2020 period.
If this was about reversion to the old pattern they'd have done a smaller set of layoffs or simply wait for a few years of zero growth.