Tech leaders seem to not have common sense about software engineering. For example, one golden rule for code review is "focus on code, not coders," but the company's code reviews turn into roast sessions, especially for those outside the "in-crowd" and outsourced personnel. “Blameless Postmortem" is another consensual after something bad happens, but, you know, pointing fingers. Such things create a hostile environment that stifles learning and growth.
The R&D process is also full of non-technical considerations. Proven solutions for handling asynchronicity are readily available and have worked well for years. Yet, the company throws them out for a webhook simply because of a leadership change. Handing off a backend service should streamline development. Instead, the outsourced team spends nearly a year refactoring the database interaction layer with a different framework. Such redundancy delivers no value to the customer and delays actual feature development.