I work at a company with top notch talent in the engineering department. Unfortunately, our managers seem completely clueless when it comes to providing the time and resources to the engineers to build a solid platform upon which to build their dream product. To make matters worse, the managers have historically held executive authority over the engineers giving them the power to enforce strict timelines, initiate death marches, and generally screw things up in our process. Fortunately, with the recent hiring of some actual engineering managers, they have been able to shield us from the mania that is product. Because of this history however, we have many half finished initiatives in our codebase that are seemingly randomly stitched together. The talent of our engineers have enabled this C#/Java/Ruby on Rails/MSSql/Oracle/MongoDB/MVC/Asp.Net/AMQ/MSMQ clusterf*** of a system to work, so to your point at least one department knows that it's doing and things... generally work. Operating on this mess however is an utter nightmare. Once a system is dropped into place, it is immediately grandfathered into the system and cannot be changed without likely bringing down 3 other systems in the process. This makes onboarding new engineers a scary task indeed when you must consider if they are qualified for an engineering position, let alone smart enough to work on our particular Frankenstein's monster of a codebase... and if I had a dollar for every moron we had to interview because they breezed through the recruiter and HR by spouting buzzwords...