[christophilus]

I had a similar experience. My first job in the industry was with a friend of mine. In two years, the two of us rearchitected an entire product line for a credit union software company-- the teller product, the loan product, the credit reporting system, the web-banking system, the audio banking system, the reporting system, an automatic updates system for the windows applications, etc. We built the mid-level service tiers as well as the UI tiers. Two people, two years. It probably wasn't the best code you've ever seen, but our new product line was the first successful deployment that company had had in over five years.

Fast forward to my next job at a massive company. My team was maybe 30 devs, and twenty testers. It took us two years to deliver two or three basic services that didn't perform well and were super complex to deploy despite the relatively simple nature of the problem we were tasked with solving.

Now, it's not apples to apples. But this pattern has followed in every job I've had except one, where I was on a small, unproductive team with an immensely bad legacy codebase.

[maxxxxx]

Same here. A while I ago I wrote a pretty complex app for test management alone with WPF in a few months. With synchronization to a server database, lots of concurrency and a lot of other stuff. Talked to users about their needs and came up with a design. Then two of us ported it to a web in a few months.

Now I have to lead development of a site that pretty much does simple CRUD and between offshore devs, proofs of concept, approvals, other teams in the corp, spec writing and reporting to management 10 devs will develop something that's technically inferior and ugly in more time. It's very frustrating.