I started with a smaller company that was eventually bought by CMCO. As time moved on after the purchase and CMCO became more involved in our operations, things started trending in the wrong direction. My penultimate boss was wonderful, deeply engaged in my department's work and my development. Then CMCO rolled all of development under one person (my final boss there). While I get the sense he was probably a bit overwhelmed and possibly even a bit out of his league in terms of what he'd taken on, it also became obvious very quickly that me and my team weren't very important. Weekly one-on-ones were something he was either late to or would skip entirely, sometimes without any explanation. This was true for almost every meeting I was in with him, even for meetings he scheduled. There probably is no more effective way to kill a direct report's drive and productivity than to basically ignore him. By the time they closed our office (which has happened to many branches), I couldn't wait to be gone. I've also never worked for a company that was so paralyzed by the idea of a lawsuit. I was even taken to task for raising a potential safety issue due to their fear of a lawsuit. That was one of the final straws for me. This was an assault on my integrity as both a person and an employee. Senior management doesn't really listen, contrary to what they say. By the time I was done, decision making was so short term as to be laughable. Retention seemed to be a growing problem, and sometimes people would suddenly be gone and there would be no explanation as to why. I must've had 8 different HR reps assigned to my department in the last 3 years I was there. One was suddenly gone and the only way I found out was a bounceback from an email I had sent to her. I truly felt if I didn't tell upper management what they wanted to hear I'd have trouble. Honesty was a dangerous trait to have.
From a product perspective, the need for sustaining efforts overwhelmed my team. I needed more people or less products, facts I backed up constantly with hard data on hours worked. I'd venture to say I had more data than any other development team there on what we worked on and how long it took to accomplish things. It was mostly ignored. By the time I left, the development efforts were focusing on "new and different" while a massive backlog of safety related activities that needed to be completed were mostly ignored. It felt like everyone was being distracted by shiny objects but not looking at what needed to be done.
