It is interesting to see most people lay the blame at the feet of developers.
The reality is that these are all business decisions:
1) Move to the cloud because the business likes the steady payout of subscriptions. Business customers love not having to hire IT teams and demand six 9s of uptime because it is someone else’s responsibility. But performance needs to just be acceptable to end users.
2) Customers refusing to upgrade on-premises software, that led to long maintenance cycles and endless patches
3) Developing once for the web vs. Multiple times for different platforms – each needing its own developers and testers.
No amount of expertise on the part of developers is going to address these fundamental forces.
Why do they all keep saying H1-B workers are underpaid? The government determines minimum pay for each application. My experience has been that this number is quite high.
This is true only until insurance decides not to pay arbitrarily. In my case I was stuck with a $112k bill. Hospital offered 50% self pay discount. Now what?
It is a mistake to adopt any agile process when the management does not have what they call the agile mindset. Both the words "downwards" and "micromanagement" are already warning signs that the company will do better with a different process.
Daily stand-ups and scrum events work very well when used as a self organizing tool for the scrum team. Micromanagers are not invited. And neither are managers. (I am saying this as a manager myself.) This is what causes the process to breakdown.