The surreal experience of my first developer job
There are lots of these half-arsed tiny tech companies in the UK (I've worked for a few).  I wonder whether this is true all over the world, or is a peculiarity of the UK?  It could be that we don't have a culture of VCs who would fund a company to the required scale and provide adult supervision.  I remember when I ran a company, raising money or even getting a bank loan was impossible.  (We just ran it on a shoestring and as a result were never able to scale.)