1. People do as much as they want to do. So if you want to do less, you can and you get away with it easily. If you want to do a lot again you can, but unfortunately you won't get any recognition for your hard work, maximum a tap on the shoulder. This creates an environment where some people work a lot and some at all. It is demoralizing for people who work a lot and want to get a good job done. A lot of these people end up not caring anymore about the business, about their job and about their career and just go there for the money.
2. Middle management is very poorly skilled. It is an old school mentality and key people are people who are there for years and are reluctant to any changes. This leaves little room for innovation and advancement. Managers don't do much besides sitting in useless meetings and signing off holidays. Some of them lack engineering capabilities/skills so they don't understand what the engineers are doing. They lack leaders skills as well and are afraid of change. It's hard to lead a group when you don't know their jobs.
3. Slow progress. Very difficult to move upwards. Very easy to stagnate.
4. Reluctant to change and new ideas.
5. Management have their favorites to which they give all the interesting projects. So they only grow a part of the team, couple of members, if not only one or two. This creates imbalance in the group and demoralizes team members.
6. Segregation. Foreigners are being put down very often by their higher management. No career prospects for them.
7. Upper management have the power to change the middle management mentality, but somehow this doesn't happen. Don't know the reasons as the visibility is close to zero at that level.
8. Very pyramidal structure with loads of levels. Engineers have visibility only over their direct team and manager. This makes communication difficult.
Overall the culture is not very good if you want to grow as an all round engineer.
