I assume you've never been in an enterprise environment. There are surely good ones, but a common theme is the following: People will outsource a lot of things

I assume you've never been in an enterprise environment. There are surely good ones, but a common theme is the following: People will outsource a lot of things. The people outsourcing are not generally knowledgeable people but managers. They buy crappy software against the advice of their own engineers and then ask the engineers to maintain it. What's worse is that a lot of young engineers will learn code from that crap. I have seen contractors in 2014 laughing at the enterprise for using something as silly as SVN or git. They sent a Whitepaper saying that file locking is the only right way of version control. Do you know how hard it is to correct a bad managers perception? I did, but I also lost my job. They also had if statements that were 2000 columns wide. Only reason I knew what because I installed a trial version of resharper and ran their code through it. You might think it's uncommon, but I've seen it in all sorts of places. The current place where it took me 2 years to convince senior management to buy resharper. They do the things I advise them to do, but it takes a shitload of convincing. An EE in the company just died of a heart attack. There's a massive load of cognitive dissonance in there, he tried to fix all sorts of stuff(which is good), but he never got around learning to objectively not care about it(i.e. if they screw up in the end it's their responsibility not yours, you advise them and they actively chose not to listen). But putting the blame on those people, is at the very least extremely disingenuous. The only fair question you can ask in this case is, why not just leave. For me it has strategic value, I generally advise people against doing so though.