Strong culture of following the spreadsheet and never questioning anything. Reports must be "green" at any cost.
Apathetic attitude toward software quality on all levels, from management to some developers.
Management lacks technical knowledge and is not willing to learn or listen to developers.
Miles of red tape for the smallest of production issues and one-line fixes.
In-house applications have decades' worth of technical debt that is never cleaned up (due to all of the above).
Favoritism bordering on racism and misogyny. Skilled developers and experienced analysts excluded from a project altogether while management's favorites with no relevant knowledge are assigned to leadership roles on the same project.
Management doublethink:
- Modernize an in-house application by creating a new UI, yet do not fix a broken 20+ years old database
- Make in-house developers prove their changes are not malicious, yet allow a project to use 10,000+ third-party NPM packages.
- Claim to be agile, yet set deadlines and release all of the application at once