No real direction and no support to figure it out yourself
Pros
The technical setup was reasonable and the codebase was maintainable, so at least the engineering was not fighting bad infrastructure.
Cons
I showed up ready to do real work but there was no actual strategy to work toward, just shifting priorities and decisions from above that never seemed fully thought through. Every few weeks the direction would change and I would restart on something different, never knowing if what I had just built actually mattered or would be abandoned tomorrow. I asked repeatedly for clarity on what we were optimizing for or trying to accomplish, and I just got corporate-speak non-answers that went nowhere. The people in charge did not seem to have a real plan themselves, which meant I spent most of my time reacting instead of building something with purpose. It got demoralizing pretty fast, and after a while I stopped investing emotionally in the work because there did not seem to be any point if everything was just going to change again.