It sounds like management intentionally created these practices. This is from a recent NY Times article about Amazon warehouse workers, but it wouldn't surprise me if this attitude was applied to all workers in the company to some degree:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/15/us/politics/amazon-wareho...:
> 5. Many of Amazon’s most contentious policies go back to Jeff Bezos’ original vision. Some of the practices that most frustrate employees — the short-term-employment model, with little opportunity for advancement, and the use of technology to hire, monitor and manage workers — come from Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive.
> He believed that an entrenched work force created a “march to mediocrity,” said David Niekerk, a former long-serving vice president who built the company’s original human resources operations in the warehouses.
> Company data showed that most employees became less eager over time, he said, and Mr. Bezos believed that people were inherently lazy. “What he would say is that our nature as humans is to expend as little energy as possible to get what we want or need,” Mr. Niekerk said. That conviction was embedded throughout the business, from the ease of instant ordering to the pervasive use of data to get the most out of employees.
In many cases software engineers overestimate their own value to the company, often to the point were they'll ape the attitudes of owners and management (e.g. rejecting the the idea of a union out of hand). But the fact of the matter is they're cogs just like warehouse workers, and in many situations competent management will exploit the hell out of them to extract maximum value for the shareholders.
As horrific as communism was, the average worker in the west probably indirectly benefited from capitalist being scared of something similar happening closer to home, and gave concessions.
After the fall of communism that trend reversed and workers are steadily loosing ground.
As someone who was born in one of those communist countries I am glad that its dead, and I don't want it to ever come back, but It did serve as an example of what can happen if you try to squeeze too much out of people.
If this was truly the case, humans would have evolved very differently (and it's needs would be substantially smaller.
Also, what about all those people working for little gain?
Also, as another data-point: slaveholders of all eras could not stop complaining about how lazy their slaves were. They expected the slaves to give their all, even though practically nothing was in it for them.
SDE1 here, I might be completely wrong but I'm inclined to believe that upper management is kept practically blind about the real struggles and issues experienced on lower-levels, and this scenario is abused by managers to scapegoat their way out of problems they have to deal with, specially the ones they created. I'm not going to provide examples as they could be easily traced back, but I can say that I've witnessed a L7 overpromissing on a project in spite of callouts from lower levels, and once postponing the delivery of some milestones started to become inevitable then I've started hearing said manager frequently mention "firing offenses" on dailies.
If your L7 is doing that, look to change teams. Incompetent people can't be fixed.
Management only needs to change if all developers go else where.
Management has zero incentive to change any of problems you signal, and probably don't see them as an issue. Probably the opposite, they see this as a winning system, and who can blaim them. AWS practices are often used as examples of best practices: you build it, you run it, 2 pizza teams, api first, etc. Survivorship bias and all, the probably regard the other characterestics of the current system as best practices as well.