I have worked in multiple companies where the internally developed software was central to the business success, yet it was handled in an extremely bad way, preventing it from using even a small percentage of its potential. The (good) developers were not the main problem there, but the management. The management did constantly override technical decisions and/or switched the main goals/vison around all the time, preventing the development from finishing anything. In several companies, they replaced the developers with ticket-crunshing code-monkeys that have no interest at all in the business at and who bring no innovation, ideas, or even feedback into their work. Some of that replacement was active, but most was by just making (work-)life miserable for anyone who cared what happened. In my case, one of these companies even offered me a big payment (one that I will probably never get anywhere else without switching to another country) for coming back, because I understand the business good enough to always fix the fires in the background that the management caused, but they still rejected any good ideas and made life worse instead of better for the people that dependent on the software. It's been almost five years since I left there, and I still have several friends in that company. One of them is one of the users of the software, another one is a developer who cares, but he could not switch because he is stuck there for several reasons. One of the main reasons being that he has medical issues that make most companies reject him by default. They keep me updated about the companies progress, or the lack of it. The latter guy told me this week, that the company made less progress in the last four years, than it did within a few weeks while the original dev team worked there. And he really wasn't exaggerating. Oh, the company has a big AI budget and they made pretty much every model available to all employees. They just can't use it for good ideas, because they will be garbled up by the management and turned around to be bad. As long as they don't replace the management with AI, this technology will not improve their business.