- A large proportion of the "technical" leadership isn't very technical: limited recent hands-on experience and an excellent ability to appear like they are, and is heavily biased toward sales/politics (which is of course vital in this industry). Coupled with a business development function that lacks deep understanding of the relevant domains, a fair proportion of our projects make little sense and are more of a way to sustain ourselves until we find more meaningful ones. Not entirely the company's responsibility: it's hard to break into "production" contracts as opposed to "proof of concept/marketing/politics oriented" ones which are fundamentally challenging. This takes its toll on morale as things can lack purpose/meaning.
- It's unclear whether senior leadership is aware of the nonsensical nature of some of our projects and keep quiet about it to maintain morale, as acknowledging this would damage morale. Perhaps they're doing the right thing, and we have to keep afloat/keep investors happy.
- Significant engineering effort goes into questionable technical initiatives (like reinventing the wheel or adding bells and whistles for the sake of it), for unclear reasons: probably a mixture of executive posturing to maintain good appearances ("look at what we've done") toward other senior leaders? This might be improving recently, but the fact that a large proportion of technical leaders aren't so technical can lead to a "yes-men" mentality, not necessarily intentional. Others might have a personal "political" stake in such projects.
- A challenge many businesses face, but in our case exacerbated (or even created) by the fact that "proof of concept/marketing/etc." driven products usually lack very tangible product considerations/use cases, so effort gets directed elsewhere.
