Resources are allocated to their constraints. You spend as much money as you have, as much time as you have, you hire as many people as you can afford, and so on.

It may be because people don't think on an absolute time scale but rather a relative one; if you make 1 million in revenue and you only have 3 employees, you might feel like you should hire more. What happens if you start making one billion in revenue?

Read Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber if you haven't already.

So , is it a result of the VC funded bubble? If that's the case it will not outlast the next bubble burst maybe.

In the early 2000s I worked for a company whose IT infrastructure was primarily Microsoft based. Maybe about 10% of the company had Macs, and we typically had to fight to get them. The Windows boxes required a huge amount of IT support per capita, while the Macs pretty much just worked and the Mac users didn't need much help. Not to mention that the Windows boxes were notoriously malware-prone and needed constant patches and the Macs didn't. I wondered for a long time why the company didn't just switch entirely to Macs. After all, most of the corporate apps were web-based and they worked fine on either platform. It took me a while to figure out exactly what you wrote above: The CIO didn't want a small, lean organization. He wanted a huge organization with a huge budget, because that's what looks good to C-level executives. Hence, Windows was the officially-sanctioned desktop solution.

I really did enjoy my brief times working on embedded devices. Design conversations are quite a bit easier when physics is on your side.

I wish the IoT space weren't such a dumpster fire. I should go back to my plan to run a website on a cluster of nanoPi's.

It’s because you can do a lot of work manually if you have 40 extra drones. If there’s only 10 of you you need to think about things and automate.

Good point that lower bandwidth was once a restraint on this.