1) While the vision is there, execution is simply lacking in most cases. Timelines are always put into place for development projects but often the features are delivered late or in states of terrible quality.
2) The initial design of projects can include many different teams to get an idea of how to best develop the product to meet the needs of customers, but after these initial meetings the developers are usually cut loose to design however they want and the feature that gets delivered is often nothing like the initial plan.
3) With the timelines that are put into place, too often flexibility is given on the development side but the final timeline (i.e. RTM) is never flexible which puts more pressure on QA testing.
4) It is often said that you should not have to put in more than your typical 40 hour work weeks, but with the timelines and workload it is not uncommon for many people to be working evenings and weekends to catch up on all the tasks.
5) Management often doesn't come to the same decision so you will start a task one way based on some direction then someone else comes down and asks why is it being done that way and tells you to change it so then you have to try to figure out who is right and waste more of your time.
6) If you are liked by the right people, you can go far. If you are not liked by the right people then your job is affected by lower compensation, more work load, fewer compliments and less recognition even if you are doing one of the better jobs on your team.
7) too much focus is given on giving new features instead of fixing existing problems. Too often these new features are then ignored out in the field and they slowly die away showing that all that time spent on it was just wasted.
8) New ideas are always coming up for side projects and ways to spread information but usually these are temporary fads. Too much time seems to be wasted on projects that quickly die off because no one uses them
