Is it middle management that has no accountability, or executive? Middle and line managers are nearly as targeted by layoff culling as ICs these days in FAANG. The broad processes they're passing down to ICs generally start with someone at director level or higher.

In my experience it is the constant shifting of goal posts due to execs chasing the next shiny thing, or demanding a feature that they saw somewhere, or heard from client (singular, not plural)

I've seen plenty of incredible engineers let go because of "performance issues" that were just poor project management and goal posts that moved so fast waymo should study them to improve their self-driving capabilities.

Shit rolls downhill and there's a lot more fuss when an engineer calls out risks, piss-poor planning, etc. than any actual introspection on why the risks weren't caught sooner or why the planning was piss-poor.