I work for a company that does very high end large scale custom design.
For this particular project I’m working on, we have hundreds upon hundreds of engineers, hundreds of shop guys/mechanics and dozens of finance people/QC people/managers. Number of industrial designers: 2. Number of interior designers: 1.
If our product doesn’t work and can’t be made within budget (or, made at all) it’s worthless. Once the visual design is finalized within the first few months of the project, the rest of our time is spent wrangling engineers and the shop guys to make sure it doesn’t just turn into a series of rectangles and tweaking it where necessary to make it work.
Someone looking at our work from the outside would probably be like “oh man I bet they hire so many designers!” but reality is much different. We can never have enough engineers and mechanics (we actually have a bounty system out for anyone who brings in new mechanics), not designers.