It’s not the devs who are bloating development costs. It’s the layers of management making hour long meetings to discuss button placement.
It’s the hours of retros, design meetings, and skip-levels designed to remove any personal investment or sense of ownership from everything.
Since so few individuals are trusted with real decision making power, you need a lot more people to achieve some kind of consensus/buy-in so that you can ship anything.
The devs are at the extreme bottom of this totem poll.
It’s like blaming construction workers for houses being expensive.
And, ofc, that goes without mentioning the multimillion yearly bonuses for C-suite, but we can just forget about that and blame the lowest ranking corporate employees (devs)
Source: I worked at a large tech firm for many years and saw this over and over again.