[rachelbythebay]

I suspect a lot of these extra steps are not contributing positively to the product. If two solid people could get the same result and there are two dozen people on something, where is all of that extra effort going?

We don’t talk too much about this.

[thinkharderdev]

If two people could get the same result then that would be strictly better, but I think the issue is that two people couldn't (or at least the two people you actually have instead of two hypothetical people who maybe were more capable). But output doesn't scale linearly with number of people involved due to various coordination/communication issues. So I think the root of the intuition we have that there is more "wasted" effort is just that people are building larger, more complex systems that need larger teams to build and the larger teams spend more effort (on a per-person basis) on coordination.

[corpMaverick]

IMHO. The effort is going to added complexity. Not doing the simplest thing that could possibly work. I suspect managers and directors allow this because they are just trying to grow the own teams as much as possible thus growing their careers.