> What world are you living in that corporations actively want their employees to work slowly or to have too many employees? Who does that benefit?
1) In the corporate world, a larger headcount under you means you get more funding for your initiatives. If you get things done with a team of five, that signals to upper management that that's all you need and your budget will be adjusted down accordingly.
2) When it comes to software, companies favor the ability to monitor and control the development process from above over speed. Agile only gets uptake among large orgs inasmuch as Agile consultants promise them this.
3) There is, decades after The Mythical Man-Month, a sense that you can get a good programmer's worth of output -- without a good programmer's worth of risk -- out of several, much more fungible, mid programmers.
4) Egos on the line. Tom Smykowski from Office Space is real. Need proof? Propose something sensible like having engineers talk to, or shadow, customers so they can see what the pain points are in their work and which pieces of the software need attention... and see who bristles.
No conspiracy is needed. Companies can remain stubbornly dysfunctional, and will bizarrely spend more to protect that dysfunction, for decades, than to try something better. My father proposed more resilient ways of running an assembly line in the 1960s, upper management laughed. In the 1980s what he proposed was one of the tenets of the "Toyota Way", but it took until the 90s/2000s for American managers to start listening.
This goes double when you realize that software is off most companies' critical path, and addressing performance issues among software teams is way less important than addressing performance issues among, say, sales and marketing teams.