I fully agree most big tech companies are pretty bloated. But FWIW a lot of my time at SaaS companies, especially in the B2B space, was spend working on features for larger customers that most others would never use or even see. Like, yeah, product X isn't that complex, but $BigCorp wants to use it in their private cloud, or needs it to be single tenant, or needs these audits done, or want their $Gov client to use it. Now you have a ton of work for zero visible changes.
replyGood point. I'm sure a lot of the work adobe was doing between 2015-2020 involved moving to the cloud and stuff like that which I just never interacted with, and cloud stuff probably has a lot of B2B work. Plus during that time the value of their stock grew like 500% with an ATH at 700%!! They were kicking ass! Probably, to justify their growth they had all kinds of projects they were working on, some of which never saw the light of day, others which grew new parts of the company like Adobe Dimension.
replyEven at companies that appear super bloated I don't think people are idle, its just that mantaining stuff is a lot of work, projects get cancelled, and, like you said they do a lot of specialty work for big clients.