* Poor career development opportunities in engineering. There is a definite "in crowd" at the top of the engineering hierarchy and projects are staffed based on their opinions
* Promotions are blatantly about who you know and how important your project is to product management, and not about contributions, skill, experience, or competence. "Standards" are bent or ignored frequently to promote some people while the goal posts are continually moved for others (often while still adding more and greater responsibility)
* Engineering leadership has no clue where they are going from month to month. Strategies change often and there are multiple silos unknowingly working against each other because the different areas don't coordinate. Other times, office politics cause them to deliberately work against each other to impress the CTO
* Engineering middle management is mostly useless. They are there to collect paychecks and make the CTO happy. A few are excellent and carry the load. Most teams are run by the senior and lead engineers. Managers and directors tend to fail upwards
* Product management staff changes often and/or has no ability to guide engineering well, leaving engineering teams to figure out how to implement product strategy
