Whenever people see old systems still in production (say things that are over 30 years old) the assumption is that management refused to fund the replacement. But if you look at replacement projects so many of them are such dismal failures that's management's reluctance to engage in fixing stuff is understandable.
From the outside, decline always looks like a choice, because the exact form the decline takes was chosen. The issue is that all the choices are bad.
In my work experience I've realized everybody fears honesty in their organization be it big or small.
Customers can't admit the project is failing, so it churns on. Workers/developers want to keep their job and either burn out or adapt and avoid talking about obvious deficits. Management is preoccupied with softening words and avoiding decisions because they lack knowledge of the problem or process.
Additionally there has been a growing pipeline of people that switch directly from university where they've been told to only manage other people and not care about the subject to positions of power where they are helpless and can't admit it.
Even in university, working for the administration I've watched people self congratulation on doing design thinking seminars every other week and working on preserving their job instead of doing useful things while the money for teaching assistants or technical personnel is not there.
I've seen that so often that I think it's almost universal. The result is mediocre broken stuff where everyone pretends everything is fine. Everyone wants to manage, nobody wants to do the work or god forbid improve processes and solve real problems.
I've got some serious ADHD symptoms and as a sysadmin when you fail to deliver it's pretty obvious and I messed up big time more than once and it was always sweet talked, excused, bullshitted away from higher ups.
Something is really off and everyone is telling similar stories about broken processes.
Feels like a collective passivity that captures everything and nobody is willing to admit that something doesn't work. And a huge missallocation of resources.
Not sure how it used to be but I'm pessimistic how this will end.
Fact of the matter: communications is everything for humans, including dealing with one's own self. Communications are how our internal self conversation mired in bias encourages or discourages behavior, communications are how peers lead, mislead, inform, misinform, and omit key information - including that critical problem information that people are too often afraid to relate.
An effective communicator can talk to anyone, regardless of stature, and convey understanding. If the information is damningly negative, the effective communicator is thanked for their insight and not punished nor ignored.
Effective communications is everything in our complex society, and this critical skill is simply ignored.
Management and executives had almost all worked their way up the ladder. Toward the end I think some of the higher-up ones were encouraged to get an MBA as they advanced, but they didn't do much hiring of MBAs.
The company got bought by another in IIRC the late 90s, and this other one had already been taking over by the "professional managerial class", and they quickly replaced most of the folks from the top down to the layer just above him with their own sort.
His description of what followed was incredible amounts of waste. Not just constant meetings that should have been emails (though, LOTS of that) but entire business trips that could have been emails. Lots of them fucking things up because they had no idea how anything worked, but wouldn't listen to people who did know. Just, constant.
The next step was they "encouraged" his layer to retire early, for any who were old enough, which was lots of them since, again, most of them had worked their way up the ladder to get where they were, not stepped straight into management as a 25-year-old with no clue how actual work gets done. I haven't asked, but I assume they replaced them with a bunch of young business school grads.
There are sometimes posts on HN suggesting that our dislike of business school sorts is silly or overblown, but if anything I think it's too weak. The takeover by them and, relatedly, the finance folks has been disastrous for actual productivity and innovation. Companies should be run by people who've done the work that the company does, and not just for an internship or something.
The fact that so many companies play tricks with CAPEX and OPEX completely misses the point that almost all corporate spending should be seen as investment or spending to support investment at some level.
The past 50 years of business school has taught people that outsourcing your core competency is a good idea because it gets things "off the books" and makes quarterly reports look better. The end result was shifting huge swaths of our economy to a hostile country.
Here in tech, I've literally seen companies shift stuff into the cloud even though it's more expensive, because OPEX can be written off right away and they don't want CAPEX on the books, only for a year later to want to shift back because they decided it's now better to optimize for actual cashflow. It's infuriating.