Think about the great lengths that good technology companies go to to get decent productivity. They have to work very hard to get it - companies that don't unde

Think about the great lengths that good technology companies go to to get decent productivity. They have to work very hard to get it - companies that don't understand it won't. What you have is incredibly common in non-technology companies. Good engineers are now very hard to recruit and expensive. Unless your company values them enormously, your engineers are going to generally be pretty mediocre[1]. On top of that, your company isn't going to understand engineering projects - when you need to invest in infrastructure, tooling and technical debt. These factors together multiply up over time until everything grinds to a halt. [1] An aside - in my experience of organisations like this and also mediocre engineering organisations, there is usually one guy who knows his stuff, and is holding it all together. Some of it is like Brent in the Phoenix project, but some of it is that the rest of the people are just rubbish.