The org structure is optimised to reduce or even minimise individual agency, explicitly at the cost of efficiency.

Teams have fiefdoms, private repos that the rest of the org can't see. You are not granted permission to see what permissions you have. Byzantine department structures. Shipping "hello world" to production takes 3-6 months and nobody can imagine it working any other way.

There's actually no central directory of teams or processes. To get anything meaningful done, you need the co-operation of maybe 8 teams but there's no consistent way to engage them all. You have to negotiate with them all in different ways, they're like little warlords, sitting and guarding access to some vital resource you need. They have established a ticket-based interface with a 7 day SLA on top of a perfectly good vending API that could do what you need in seconds. Sometimes a blocking team has a 3 month backlog so your project will just have to wait.

Everything is always in the process of being restructured, so no end to end 6 month process happens the same way every time.

These organisations could use AI to run the end to end process in minutes. Heck, they could just put APIs on top of what they already have. But the way they WANT to use it is to keep doing what they're doing but with EVEN MORE form filling and paperwork.

You would think they would get outcompeted, but no. The "IT organisation" sits like a brain slug on top of an enterprise with substantial regulatory, capital and execution moats.

Big cuts of course do happen in these places, but it's often for optics (we need to signal that we care about efficiency, and AI is a great excuse). But you can't protect yourself by being efficient and good at your job, because the cuts were not about output.

I want to do MORE with the same amount of folks.

Good! Costs going down is great

Why would we care about team size?

Doesn't the world have many more software engineers today than at the start of the evolution of cloud based software?