The senior leaders and especially those in engineering are disconnected at best. The company has multiple teams that have more departures than hires and their response has been to do nothing. I honestly don't know if they're just lying to try to keep people optimistic or if they're trying to hide their own incompetence. Maybe this is what they want? A number of the technical leads seem to be in over their heads and refuse to admit they need help, too.
If that wasn't enough already the leadership have allowed an elite few to push their own agendas leaving the company down the road of using technologies based on people's opinions and preferences rather than deciding based on facts and requirements.
Some of these barely-understood systems are in production use or are part of our critical path despite the fact that in some cases only a single engineer has background on them and everyone is afraid to touch them if that person is away. We're using a build system nobody uses because someone wanted it.
What compounds that into an absolute disaster is that the inner circle has started using a "let's talk offline" tactic in chat to move any discussions about their failures away from being recorded. People put the absolute minimum effort into failure follow-up if they even bother to admit a problem happened and these behaviors just continue because there's zero accountability.
Two executives (one the CTO) disappeared. The CTO returned but is no longer the CTO. Nobody seems to know what happened in either case and yet the company continues to pretend there's transparency.
If you look outside of engineering at the product side of the house the story is no better. There are PMs and leaders running around trying to launch new features like their lives depended on it despite the fact that there is an ever-growing Mount Everest of technical debt that's being ignored. They continue to prioritize features and functionality over all other work leaving engineers scrambling for time to even write reasonable tests for new functionality.
This isn't healthy and I'm going to join the others who have left soon -- I've started talking to recruiters, too.
