[alttag]

I had a previous job that was this way. Their informal mantra was "Do it now, scrape the blood off the walls later." In practice, this meant poorly communicated expectations, multiple conflicting reporting lines, non-specific project task ownership (everyone owned it, or someone else did and you were expected to as well), and best of all, no formal (or even informal) QA process.

No surprise then, that between the various forms of attrition (whether from firing, as managers spread blame and scapegoated, or quitting from those capable and prescient enough to see it coming) the company lost nearly half of its IT staff in a 12-month period, which included a major software release.

[marrs]

Yep, that pretty accurately describes where I once worked. But I don't think this is a bad thing from the perspective of the board of directors, only for the likes of you and me.

Remember, the goal is to spend as little money as possible developing a product/service and then sell out in 5 years. So you want to hire inexperienced but talented drones who will do as they're told and give you value for money (i.e. work their evenings and weekends for free). Anyone with the sense to push back on that needs to be cut loose fast.