Cronyism. Promotions and bonuses go to the besties of the VP level, typically to loudmouths and bullies. Rank & file team players get ignored except for being expected to hit ever-shorter deadlines.
CEO seems to not have a strategy, in a recent public interview he looked like he was out of his league. Embarrassing.
Despite endless talk of accountability, it never seems to apply to Senior Directors and above. For example, CSLT stock is currently near a 2 year low (despite the rest of the industry sector going gangbusters) so ... we gave the leadership team a huge round of promotions. Say whaa!
Promotions and full bonuses go to buddies of the in-crowd. Beware if you are considering your full bonus part of your package, unless you are good at managing-up. It's hard to see any correlation between promotions and competence.
There's no discernible strategy, unless it is to cut costs by doing more and more development overseas, while asking all developers to "act like startups" and do more work.
BEWARE if you are a technical woman: the sexism is flagrant and no-one seems to care.
Joining engineering is like going back in time 20 years. Some teams do CI, some don't. Laughably painful monthly manual production deploys. Unwieldy ball-of-mud SOA "architecture" that badly needs some actual architecture. The QA management claims to be "scalable" by asking the team to only do automation, not to actually look for bugs.
Engineering is explicitly hierarchical: decisions are made at the top, the troops are given orders, and leadership does not explain decisions. Inputs from the troops are neither valued nor asked for.
Ivory tower architects, who seem otherwise unemployable, make wide-ranging decisions on technology. The end result is both predictable and either hilarious or tragic, depending on your point of view. Mediocrity is rampant and it seems to be accepted, good engineers tend not to tolerate it for long.
R&D is on consecutive death marches, always to met some new deadline so there's never time to address the ever-accumulating tech debt (except for talking about it). These deadlines are always vaguely defined bet-the-company deals which don't instill confidence in the "leaders".
Engineering leadership is technically lightweight, and replete with Dilbertesque people managers pushing people to "do more" and bullying them into toeing the line.
