As an IC, one reason I left my old (hated) job was precisely that

As an IC, one reason I left my old (hated) job was precisely that. The product was barely-functional shit. We once spent 8 months implementing a "feature" that had senior engineers walking off the program in protest, only for them to be validated when said feature caused us to miss our contractual requirements just like said senior engineers said it would, and we spent another 8 months ripping it out. Naturally I went looking for answers, started asking polite questions of my boss at 1-on-1s, started attending program-level meetings that engineers didn't typically show up to but were large/open enough I could blend into the background, and discovered that the root of the problem was roughly 3 levels into management and they weren't going to give a shit about what some engineers thought they should prioritize, even if we could tie it to financials/hours worked/cost savings (we tried and were politely ignored). Left for a smaller program at a different company, and it's night and day. …