In the companies focus on trying to steal management from competitors they have become very top heavy and crippled by meetings. It was easier to get a half a dozen managers in a meeting than to get a single technician to test the product you are engineering.
In the rush to beat the competition to market, the accompanying rush to get out products left many things desired for quality. We wasted more time chasing the fires caused by issues rushing around does than being proactive. The push gave us no choice but to do the absolute minimum development, testing and documentation. Often we had to ask was can cut out so we can make some deadline marketing gave to a customer. It felt like the management focus is that the product goes out whether it was ready or not as it was more important to fill a shelf . The culture was that you can always later get the whole department to stop what they are working on for a few days to engineer some quick fix than to on deal with the fallout from a bad product.
It seemed the company looks more at profit as a sign of their doing well, than anything else. As profits for the company went up, benefits went down for most employees except management which has grown in size. When I was there they eliminated all of the worker's profit sharing and even took away our Thanksgiving turkey - talk about being out of touch!
Promotions came two ways - seems you are guaranteed promotions just if you are in management, but for the rest of the company, promotions usually only meant more more with minimal increase in compensation.
