I see this all the times and I've done my fair share of it. This is happening because nobody care in your company. The bigger the company, the more the layers

I see this all the times and I've done my fair share of it. This is happening because nobody care in your company. The bigger the company, the more the layers of middle managers, the more the pocket of productivity where someone can hide and do little. Join a startup and they founders in person will overwork you to the bone. Having seen a few organisations I have a personal scale that goes from solo founder to government of a country: the more you get closer to a government, the more you see resources being wasted (of money, of time, of talent). When I've been on the manager side, I punished a few underperforming engineers (which led to team change and then firing, as per company policy) but I could have very well avoided the discussion completely; my boss had no idea about my performance or about the performance of my teams. Even if he asked I could have easily come up with 10 different excuses about why productivity is so low. I had no incentives to get those people fired; I didn't get a raise; the probability of my company's stock being worth more because of that may have increased by some uber minuscule amount (mid companies tend to obsess about increasing returns while making sure no-one in the company has a chance to innovate, to experiment, to fail and try again; employees input is a tiny percentage of making a profit on equity). The lack of accountability starts at the board of directors. Not a lot of people really care deeply about a company that sits on their fund's portfolio. Sometimes, even when they care, they tend to be too polite to underperforming managers. That lack of accountability trickle down through managers up to individual contributors. Every X years, after the company, unsurprisingly, doesn't deliver the expected returns the board decides to go into nazi mode, cut everything down for a bit and then go back to not caring. On top of this horrible corporate lifecycle, the work done by engineers can be clouded pretty easily so evaluating poor performance vs poor conditions is not easy.