I used to work in small teams/companies or alone and got a lot done that way. Now I am in a big corporation and I am still stunned by the overhead there . Between coordinating with other teams, dealing with offshore teams and reporting to management you barely get any work done. And if you get anything done it's usually mediocre because there is no room for experimentation or rapid change if something doesn't work. I am just finishing a project that took 2 years. I am thoroughly convinced that the 2 developers who did most of the work could easily have done it in half the time if they didn't have to work with other teams who didn't deliver and stakeholders who couldn't make up their mind. We could just have worked through each issue but instead we had to wait for other teams and deal with their mediocre output which was incredibly frustrating and demoralizing.
It seems the bigger a company gets the more they favor predictability over excellence.
It seems the bigger a company gets the more they favor predictability over excellence.