It’s starting to become to many to count…
Ultimately, unrealistic goals are the norm. Management actively places requirements / processes they know don’t work, but are effectively kicking the bucket down the road so they can point the finger down below at “naysayers” who are forced to point out a plan’s issues since the lower rungs of the org have to execute. We know the schedule is made up — many even laugh about it publicly — yet somehow it stays the way it is. Blue’s way of incentive is to lie to you about urgency in hopes you finish earlier than they really need. Since everyone knows, it just ruins morale and degrades of individual agency in one’s role (i.e. we know what we say doesn’t matter). A core part of the issue is that we’re essentially a vanity project for the wealthy and have a sole financier (Daddy Bezos). He and upper management appear to play games, at the rest of our expenses, that seems to create this strange brand of corporate fascism where we’re expected to look foolishness square in the eye and call it genius. Often times, Blue is a paradox of too many processes that are cumbersome to follow for items of not major importance will little process to support highly complicated issues / needs where such guidance would make a huge difference for lessons learned and beneficial standardization.
However, the real kicker is that there are some real bad eggs that get to hide in the confusion. It ranges from normal individual contributers who literally sit / do nothing for months to managers trying to hold onto titles they can no longer justify. It results in an ugly environment where you can get bullied from multiple directions by mediocre middle managers grasping for straws while simultaneously watching someone else outright lie about work that is objectively incomplete (overall, pretty dystopian). Also, the confusion results in engineers (and others) projecting false confidence / arrogance that creates an environment where people are doing everything to appear smarter than everyone else (save actually being smarter or doing more to showcase said intelligence) with the least amount of effort — it allows for toxic personalities to really thrive by putting others down while failing to actually own or perform any of the work they may be criticizing. There was a time where there was at least comraderie in the struggle, but it’s really started to dissipate. We’ve turned into another SpaceX, which sucks, because the point wasn’t to be SpaceX — the point was to balance space with at least a somewhat healthy work environment. Seems likes that’s been lost and it’s unclear if it’ll return. I kind of wish we had old Blue again.