[NickM]

SWE salaries are a massive cost. Improving productivity is one way of offsetting that cost.

In a lot of businesses you get praise and look important if you’re responsible for leading a large group of highly paid employees, more so then if you have a smaller team.

Thus the motivation is frequently to spend as much money as possible, not to improve efficiency.

If you improve efficiency then maybe you just get your team size cut and people ask hard questions about why you needed all those resources in the first place.

[zdragnar]

This is true only so long as employees are actually producing things. Case in point: I'm working for a tiny company building an internal tool for a very very large company because their internal team isn't getting the job done. Hard questions are being asked, but not of us.

Maybe things were different in the days of zero APR free money being thrown left and right at companies to keep growing, but I don't think we'll see a return to that any time soon.