Tell HN: Things were in dark ages of development vs. now (bloated)

I became a professional developer in 2010. In the big scope of things not that long ago. Def not the dark ages like the title suggests but hopefully you'll let me slide. At my first job as a professional developer it was me, a UX guy and a boss. Back then we called UX guys graphic designers, he basically spent all his time in photoshop. He would make an image, get the thumbs up from the boss, and then slice that image up into smaller pieces. I'd go off and code the website.

Things grew from there. The UX guy became the graphic designer and we hired an actual UX person. They provided feedback to the graphic designer on how he could make his designs better. Our designs def got more usable, I even liked them more but I questioned how this was a full time job. It seemed like we only needed this persons actual services maybe a couple hours a month.

Where shit really started to hit the fan though was when the marketing lady couldn't get her new website as fast as she wanted it. We had things all geared up and moving along at a solid pace but she wanted it faster. Her answer was that we needed to hire more people. So my boss did just that. This is where the problems begin.

We would keep hiring more and more developers till eventually we had a small team, maybe 6 or 7. From there they decided they also needed a project manager and a program manager and a scrum master. This all happened over the course of years and many projects but the driving factor was always we need to done faster. We started having all these meeting and a clearly defined process. Meanwhile the business just wanted more and more so what did we do? We created more teams, pods as we called them.

All of these teams led to bureaucracy. The need for more process. Meanwhile less got done. No one ever stopped to ask are we actually going faster? I think the most important question to have asked would of been were we better off w/ a small amount of people but possible taking longer for projects? I think the answer is a clear yes.