The really weird thing at that is that the efficiency that is demanded from the lower levels is squandered by the higher ones.

I'm working for a large corporation, and while I'm doing my job quite well (at least I think am), my work is useless. On the one hand, management constantly pivots. Today feature X is super important. Let's invest multiple millions and crunch time to get this done as fast as possible. It's almost done now, so now it turns out it's really not important any more. Shelve it for a few months or years and do something else instead that's super important until we don't care about it any more.

But not only is the work useless because "agile means upper management can change their mind twice daily", but the thing I'm working on is a marketing app that nobody wants anyway. People just use it because they get some small discounts, but really nobody has an actual benefit of the app itself.

You could probably close down the whole marketing department of the corporation and nobody would notice an actual difference.

The same holds true for most corporate jobs. It's so much politics and so much thinking firmly inside my own little drawer that there's really no point to all of that.

And with all of that waste happening, it's really ridiculous that anyone in upper management even dares to utter the term "efficiency", let alone pressures employees into anything for the purpose of efficiency.