I'd say that general office politics and bureaucratic friction is a big one in the industry.
Project Managers can be hunting for quick wins to protect their own jobs, so they lead developers down stupid feature paths for the appearance of productivity rather than focusing on the great feature the company really needs, but that requires some focused work.
Managers are bad at assessing productivity, so they adopt bad processes (constant scrum meetings and the like) that can be draining towards motivation, purely to have some way to track people. And even when managers try and come up with some objective methods of measuring productivity, they're usually stupid ones; think of counting lines of code as an example.
Hiring enough employees is a big minefield. Managers are protecting their budgets and roles in an organization. What should become a relatively quick and simple process (have one technical leader pick a few promising resumes out of a pile, then have your devs talk to and pick the smartest people) can morph into an 18 step ordeal with lots of slow communication between half a dozen committees.
Comments
I'd say that general office politics and bureaucratic friction is a big one in the industry.
Project Managers can be hunting for quick wins to protect their own jobs, so they lead developers down stupid feature paths for the appearance of productivity rather than focusing on the great feature the company really needs, but that requires some focused work.
Managers are bad at assessing productivity, so they adopt bad processes (constant scrum meetings and the like) that can be draining towards motivation, purely to have some way to track people. And even when managers try and come up with some objective methods of measuring productivity, they're usually stupid ones; think of counting lines of code as an example.
Hiring enough employees is a big minefield. Managers are protecting their budgets and roles in an organization. What should become a relatively quick and simple process (have one technical leader pick a few promising resumes out of a pile, then have your devs talk to and pick the smartest people) can morph into an 18 step ordeal with lots of slow communication between half a dozen committees.