No guidance or support from management or upper management. Attempting to engage in meaningful debate with your manager in meetings gets you put on a personal improvement plan because they're too spineless to address you face to face and would rather draft up a PIP based on lies and pawn you off on HR than actually do their job and manage you, or the team.
No concept of process, and the sprint metrics are the only thing that matters. Despite hiring an agile coach to come in and work with the company to get everyone on track for implementing agile practices and having a glimmer of hope for success, upper management has somehow been able to take the very metrics that are supposed to used to protect teams from being buried in work from the business and unfair scrutiny from anyone not involved with doing the work and weaponized them. Sprint reviews for the tech department became demoralizing trips to the principal's office, opportunities to learn and become better became 40 minute arguments and tirades of abuse against the poor souls that didn't complete all of their work for the sprint, and instead of working together as a team to figure out what can be done to improve for the next sprint, you get thrown under the bus, raked across hot coals and berated for not "meeting expectations".
Mangers can apparently hand out PIPs with impunity and not be held accountable. HR apparently just rubber stamps them. I'm not sure how a barely coherent PIP with no punctuation, run on sentences and no specific examples of the issues being addressed or quantifiable changes to be made is allowed to be put into place otherwise.
The casual and breathtakingly cavalier manner in which PIPs are issued is extremely concerning. HR, upper management and my manager all insisted it was in place to "help" me despite my job being on the line and a complete lack of effort made by any of them to address and solve any of the flimsy accusations made in the PIP.
Upper management has made no effort to mentor the new managers, and the new managers have made no effort to cultivate and grow their teams to be resilient. Project planning and design is non-existent, the idea of an MVP for greenfield projects is unheard of, and iteration isn't allowed. Senior developers are neutered in their decision making and forced to adhere to whatever demands the manager makes, and then take the blame when things come crashing down.
The tech stack is a dizzying array of different disparate data stores and language patterns that constantly cause system instability, outages and make it nigh impossible to make changes without breaking things. There is, once again, no support or directive from management or upper management to mitigate these issues and make a firm effort to get off unsupported versions of ancient technologies, consolidate things or improve CI/CD capabilities so that things can be released in smaller, more manageable units. They won't even pay for IntelliJ licenses so all the developers are using the free version.
