The primary cause of grief comes directly from top-down. GloFo Malta is a 3 year old site trying to compete with the big boys. As a result, we're operating at a faster speed than we can handle. There is an inherent false sense of urgency that comes with corporate projects. The engineers are very well aware that we cannot develop the next technology with the allocated time, yet are nevertheless forced to work towards an impossible goal.
Consequently, work/life balance is skewed. Most engineers are thus forced to work seven days a week and be "on-call" for the remainder.
Given the youth of the company, many of the mid level managers are former employees of another company within the industry. A great deal too many will hold firm to his or her own past workings and believe only in self-judgment. almost outright refusing to accept current facts from their engineers.
Higher management refuses to take responsibility for failures to the end-customer and rather prefers to play the blame game against their own employees. Overall, it leads to one big, collective, political mess.
Upper management claims to be results and data driven yet ignores the data engineers put in front of them.
There is a great waste of engineering talent. Much of the output of the part of the job that requires any means of engineering is often not utilized, either due to negative results (management only reports the half-truth to customers) or irrelevancy (because the situation has changed since).
Following the above point, because the company "prioritizes" everything simultaneously, the integrated process changes daily. There is no sense of norm or control. It is not possible for the engineers to try to resolve a problem if the very circumstances of which the problem resides is subjected to constant change.
