Often more chaotic than it needs to be (perhaps this comes with the territory of being 'fast-paced' but imo it shouldn't need to).
Systemic/organisational problems are often misattributed to to individuals, which can lead to unjust performance reviews, PIPs, or redundancies (I say this as someone who was not impacted by any of those). Additionally this misattribution often means that the root causes are never addressed, instead they hope that new hires will magically do better than their predecessors (they do not).
Historically layoffs have disproportionately impacted women, particularly in Product & Engineering (unsure about other minorities). Gender diversity has fallen off a cliff in the past year after layoffs and attrition (it used to be really good). There have been some efforts to address it but it seems unlikely to return to what it used to be. It would have been much better to more seriously consider equity when deciding who to lay off in the first place.
I'm not too familiar with exactly how this works, but my understanding is that code contribution metrics (number of commits, mean time to merge etc) are used as a part of performance reviews. Many engineers would agree that this is not an accurate reflection of an individuals contribution but can be useful for detecting and understanding more systemic issues. This has changed how engineers work and undermines the goal for engineers to be more 'product minded' and collaborative as they have to be constantly thinking about these metrics.
Executive leadership and decision makers find it difficult to build consensus and maintain conviction. This results in high amounts of 'thrashing' where decisions can quickly be overturned repeatedly. This can often lead to sluggish product development which is misattributed to the team of individuals tasked with delivering the project.
Those that find themselves working on a project which is a 'key focus area' often experience high levels of pressure, scrutiny, and micromanagement from leadership which can lead to burnout.
Employee turnover means that much institutional product knowledge has been lost. Repeatedly I've come across instances where the team started running an experiment we already did less than 2 years ago, but decided it was a good idea because that historical knowledge doesn't exist within the organisation anymore.
