Capital One

Aside from the product owners, the engineering group was very professional, easy to work with, and had some definite talent.

The management structure is very dated. Essentially all engineering teams are run by a Product Owner.

The product owners sit in meetings and groom backlogs; they're not capable of contributing meaningfully to technical discussions.

Some have a technical background, but within a few months, they're completely out of date on any given stack and are functionally unable to manage an engineering team.

At that point, there's a real problem: software decision-making is entirely driven by non-technical staff. This, of course, is a perverse incentive. Instead of an engineer driving technical decisions, designing software, and innovating, the engineers have to effectively beg product owners for tasking (e.g., "Please let me solve this issue the right way"). Any incentive an engineer had to excel in their trade will quickly be exhausted by this poor organizational structure.