1. All talk and no support for automation. I want to be rich, handsome, and well-liked too but none of that happens without a lot of serious work if I’m just a pretty face with a horrible personality and refuse to admit that’s a big problem
2. Reactionary (vs responsive) culture - all the bad, none of the good of what allows agility. If there was vision and a real need to deploy more often, that would have been solved as a priority to help speed. Instead, all had been around for 5+ years cobbling together bad processes, tribal knowledge first, and burn-out of engineers related to the failing processes was the rule not exception.
3. Lack of understanding of how to grow beyond a certain engineering maturity level - ceremonies over results and design is common as a reaction. A lot of companies do “Agilefall” for example and watch quality and throughout drop like a rock. I’m not sure if there’s an equivalent portmanteau for “Devops tools and processes with none of the benefits of automation and all of the drawbacks of code”
I agree with this. Most times I've been interviewing for "devops" roles what the employer was looking for was, actually, a sysadmin to babysit the devleopers (in terms of being a "dedicate resource").