I've really got a gripe over this whole "Bloated" discourse. Tech companies aren't bloated and this is a ridiculous literal way of viewing engineering. You cann

I've really got a gripe over this whole "Bloated" discourse. Tech companies aren't bloated and this is a ridiculous literal way of viewing engineering. You cannot map every engineer to a singular function fulfilling a singular goal for a singular customer. It's like looking at VC and saying "Boy, you really are wasteful, for every 100 bets you make only 5 pay off, you should stick to just picking the 5 that pay off". It doesn't work that way, you have to invest in all the ways that have positive expectancy because you don't know a priori which ones are going to pay off and you need scale in order to spread that risk. So yes, there are lots of engineers at tech companies doing all sorts of different things, and thousands of engineer-years worth of energy are spent on projects that don't pay off. But that's not bloat, it's strategy. And particularly, in an era of cheap money, the risk-reward ratio was strongly on the side of "make more bets".