Before I was in this industry most other things aren't ritualistic in their delivery. In retail, in healthcare, in hospitality, in television - it was very much quality/event driven. A thing was done it can't continuously improved upon. Software (at least relative to me) is like working on a dish as a chef that is never complete. A patient that never is healed etc. It's because so much about ritualistic definition of the task over and over. In mission critical scenarios I do feel waterfall is better. Agile is something where a small team can actually make something over time, lots of time but it's become a thing where meetings (and their number) are measured as part of the success of a project. Not the actual delivery.

I'm guessing in retail you weren't a walmart greeter.

It's not just capitalism. Bloated management and wasteful processes are problems under feudalism and communism too.

If anything, the modern management structure more closely resembles a mini-communist state than a capitalist system.

Each department's revenue goes into a shared pool, which is distributed amongst the company in annual planning cycles by an unelected board of representatives. Who gets what is as much a function of meritocratic principles like department revenue as it is of who happens to have senior leadership's ear that year (how many times have executives been convinced X is the future, we need more X, with no concrete performance to back that up?).

There are some larger, more sophisticated companies that break this mold, but more the exception than the rule, I think.

I have been saying this. Large corporations are command economies! There is a ton of bureaucracy too.

wait wait you think meetings, rituals, and meta work didn't exist in communism?

The poster most likely thinks that communism/socialism are utopia producing methodologies that have never been tried for real and all evils are because capitalism.

All that stuff is actually _even worse_ under alternative economic systems. Spend a few hours talking with someone -- anyone -- who comes from a Communist country and ask them about this.