- Leadership is very slow to recognize and address systemic / cultural / structural problems, treating their symptoms (burnout, retention issues) as failures of the individual ("you can skip lunch to attend mindfulness training to fix your burnout").
- Massive timeline pressures put dev teams in survival-mode mindset, causing siloing and preventing real improvement.
- Dev org pushed all the way to the right on project timelines -- PBP feels like a traditional industry player with some software projects, not a software company.
- Developers and dev teams treated like faceless, interchangeable pieces in a game of Gantt Chart Tetris rather than individuals, to the point where most managers will get upset if you say "people" instead of "resources" (and those who don't get mad treat it as a joke).
- HR runs statistical games to claim that salary is "on par with market standard" while carefully excluding the companies PBP loses its talented developers to.
- Product management is a revolving door.
- Established business model is a race to the bottom but that's where 80%+ of effort goes.
- Tendency to hire externally for management/leadership roles - usually people the CTO knows from elsewhere - rather than promoting internally.
- Dev leadership is a sausage party.
