Management is 100% tops-down. Seniors spend their time engaging in politics and asking middle management to figure out details they haven't fully understood, which are passed onto individual contributors who are too inexperienced to do so. Constant burning platforms and plans being thrown out the window because of new political developments at the top.
Individual contributors have no voice and cannot influence what they deliver. Your skills are only useful if they help your manager deliver something to their manager. Customers and quality are not part of the equation. More effort is put into presenting upwards than building quality products. Paired with the constant chaos described above, talented contributors burn out quickly and teams become revolving doors.
Work-life balance is not a thing here. Work is continually being done and discussed over 3 time zones. Teams that should be working together cannot. Some days start at 7, some days end at 1am. There are, however, daily calendar invites for 15-minute wellness breaks, and a meeting-free day that nobody adheres to.
There is nobody left who understands customer behaviors or our existing systems. It feels very odd to work with teams who don't understand the things they're building. Test environments are frequently broken and inconsistent with customer experiences, which are a messy hodgepodge to begin with. Rather than fix debt, teams drop their work and chase new goals cooked up by disconnected management. Nothing gets done. Lots of siloing, incomplete features, duplicate work, and competing systems that have to be reconciled. Management never acknowledges these and simply marches forward with whatever they're tasked with that week. It's no wonder the products are so poor.
Upward mobility doesn't exist here, on any level. There is no framework for growth if your only contributions are jumping exactly as high as you're asked to.
