Even at a higher level what you are observing frequently use caused by politics (which admittedly frequently go hand in hand with incompetence or putting person

Even at a higher level what you are observing frequently use caused by politics (which admittedly frequently go hand in hand with incompetence or putting personal gain over company outcomes). Especially technical efforts frequently come under attack by product people who are in turn frequently under pressure my sales staff. Nobody along that line has the full picture and pushes for their issues to be solved which seem most urgent to them. Sometimes this business pressure results in correct decisions which still suck. An example might be interrupting a project or cutting corners to get a feature out to get a contract signed and make payroll. Two years later people wonder why the code is shit but the answer is that the company was struggling to survive and corners were cut left and right. Of course often it's just stupidity. I've seen cases where a PM would ask to get a unvetted pet project staffed ("all I need is two people for a week!!") outside of department planning cycles and later this was used in a write up with new leadership as an example of "engineering refusing to work with product".