I'm nodding along to this list because I've been consulting with a large government department that has dozens of programmers with the effective output of maybe... two? Three at the most.
They tick just about every item on that list. Staggering inefficiencies everywhere, duplicated work, duplicated codebases, etc, etc...
The worst thing about these problems is that they compound, often exponentially or at least quadratically. Slow builds mean bug fixes take longer. Longer bug fix times means they can't all be fixed to meet deadlines. That means that they now have to be prioritised, which incurs management overheads and shuffling things around in spreadsheets. This then delays things further, which means even critical requirements (security!) get dropped on the floor.
The inevitable consequence is that things are constantly breaking in production, and everyone spends half their time fighting fires. Fires that were marked as a "low-priority" smell of smoke six months ago.
Productive staff see the writing on the wall, quit, leaving only the unproductive staff that "couldn't get a job elsewhere".
The snowball builds rapidly from here into an avalanche of badness.
I worked in such a place. Worst job I’ve ever had, extremely toxic culture, I ended up burning out and quitting. It took me 18 months to recover from my 3 years nightmare there. Never again.
They tick just about every item on that list. Staggering inefficiencies everywhere, duplicated work, duplicated codebases, etc, etc...
The worst thing about these problems is that they compound, often exponentially or at least quadratically. Slow builds mean bug fixes take longer. Longer bug fix times means they can't all be fixed to meet deadlines. That means that they now have to be prioritised, which incurs management overheads and shuffling things around in spreadsheets. This then delays things further, which means even critical requirements (security!) get dropped on the floor.
The inevitable consequence is that things are constantly breaking in production, and everyone spends half their time fighting fires. Fires that were marked as a "low-priority" smell of smoke six months ago.
Productive staff see the writing on the wall, quit, leaving only the unproductive staff that "couldn't get a job elsewhere".
The snowball builds rapidly from here into an avalanche of badness.