This article resonates strongly. I am consulting right now to a group that has enormous struggles technically, but they are all self-inflicted wounds that come down to people and process.

Management claims to want to understand and fix the problem, and their "fixes" reveal the real problems. Fix 1 - schedule a lot of group meetings for twice a week. After week 1, management drops off and fails to show up anymore for most of them. The meetings go off track. The answer? More meetings!

We now have that meeting daily. And have even less attendance.

Fix 2 - we don't know what people are doing, let's create dashboards. A slapdash, highly incorrect and problematic dashboard is created. It doesn't matter, because none of the managers ever checks the dashboard. The big boss hears we are still behind, and commandeers a random product person to be his admin assistant and has her maintain several spreadsheets in semi-secret tracking everyone's progress.

This semi-secret spreadsheet becomes non-secret and people find a million and one problems with it (not surprising as the commandeered admin assistant nee product person was pulling the data from all sorts of random areas with little direction with little coordination with others). We then have the spreadsheet war of various managers having their own spreadsheets.

Fix 3 - we are going to have The Source of Truth for product intake and ongoing development, with a number of characteristics (and these are generally not terrible characteristics). These are handed off to a couple of junior people with no experience to implemented with zero feedback. The net result is we still don't have a Source of Truth, but more of an xkcd situation that now we have 4 or 5 sources of truth strung together with scripts, duct tape, bandaids and prayer.

This continues on and on over years. Ideas are put forth, some good, some bad, some indifferent, but none of them matter because the leaders lack the ability to followup or demonstrate even basic understanding of what our group actually does.

It is truly soul crushing, but in this jobs environment, what are you going to do?