- they stuck in time when their major project began (about 15 years ago): old tools, old techniques, old mindset, etc.
- enormous amount of monkey job with extensive way of solving problems (more people, more work hours), despite huge number of projects and millions lines of code automation is in its infancy
- management is in horror of any sort of change
- very contrast environment: either you see someone who's been working here for 10+ years or someone who graduated yesterday. Former will teach the latter how to think inside the box
- it looks like the last brick in the architecture of the system was laid about 5-7 years ago and most clever people left the company. Since then it's only support, bugfixing, meetings and bureaucracy
- very strange idea of efficiency: to hire a Senior Engineer to do full-time testing job
- if you like to code - forget about it (I wrote around 100 lines of code this year, none of them went to production anyway)
- mostly very unskilled and short-sighted engineers (sad but true)
- for instance it's ok for Senior Engineer not to know Java exceptions hierarchy or have absolutely no clue how to make code threadsafe (I'm not even talking about effectively concurrent code)
- as for performance improvements they still guess, not benchmark; very few senior people know how to use profiling tools
- ... yeah, I'd better stop here :)
