Working at a place like this now and I saw at least one previous workplace go from a healthy engineering org to something like this when they brought in new engineering leaders who all wanted to make their mark quickly.
The problem is often systemic and a symptom of an engineering team not really having control over their own roadmap. You see it when an engineering team isn't agreeing to take on work, but rather being told what to work on by people outside of the team. Sometimes it's isolated to a single team, but sometimes it can be a whole org or company. It's caused by bad expectations around the amount of work that can be done and unclear priorities. How many people it affects depends on what level the bad expectations are being set at.
In practice, this is how I've seen it play out. There are 10 developers worth of work that needs to be done by X date, but we only have a team of 8. No one has made it clear what the prioritization is or if they have, that priority isn't universally accepted or changes day to day. If everything is equally important, the tough work that may not have noticeable results is often what gets pushed into the backlog over and over. To people who see engineers as the "build new features" people, it's hard to regularly justify "I can't build feature X because I have to solve bug Y" and then a week later say "I still have no idea what's causing this issue".
It's easy to say, well just get everyone to agree on priority and what a reasonable amount of work is, but that's far, far easier said than done.
The problem is often systemic and a symptom of an engineering team not really having control over their own roadmap. You see it when an engineering team isn't agreeing to take on work, but rather being told what to work on by people outside of the team. Sometimes it's isolated to a single team, but sometimes it can be a whole org or company. It's caused by bad expectations around the amount of work that can be done and unclear priorities. How many people it affects depends on what level the bad expectations are being set at.
In practice, this is how I've seen it play out. There are 10 developers worth of work that needs to be done by X date, but we only have a team of 8. No one has made it clear what the prioritization is or if they have, that priority isn't universally accepted or changes day to day. If everything is equally important, the tough work that may not have noticeable results is often what gets pushed into the backlog over and over. To people who see engineers as the "build new features" people, it's hard to regularly justify "I can't build feature X because I have to solve bug Y" and then a week later say "I still have no idea what's causing this issue".
It's easy to say, well just get everyone to agree on priority and what a reasonable amount of work is, but that's far, far easier said than done.