Red tape and lots of it. Things can be quite opaque and this can be difficult for someone who thinks of their future and wants to plan their career.
People try to hold on to "what is theirs" and there is a culture that promotes "tradition" and "seniority" even when it is inappropriate and only holds the company back. Plenty of legacy stuff that will not go away even though it is a waste of resources. Trying to adopt or promote modern approaches and methods you will step on someones toes and make someone unhappy.
May not always be the best place for creative, motivated, independent thinkers who want to always advance and move forward.
Mediocrity is abound and if you do not keep yourself current you may find it tough in outside world when you leave. If you are brilliant or over achiever you may stick out like a sore thumb with all that you would expect from that. Plenty of group think and people going with the flow to avoid confrontation. People are rather keep quiet and avoid conflict rather then help the company be better by saying what needs to be done.
Internal communication is inefficient, abundant use of outdated methodology, approaches, ideas and technology. Trickle down approach means that what you doing might be meaningless in the great scheme of things and when it goes into production.
Depending on who you work for your career might be influenced by opinions of a single person regardless of your merit, skills or aptitude. There are many brilliant people who could be taking the company to the next level and into the future who get no recognition and their efforts are ignored or even suppressed.
You maybe irrelevant.
Inefficiency. Inefficiency. Inefficiency. They working on it but when it takes you many months to understand how things work you know you have the problem. You may have to do thinks that make no sense as part of the job, everybody knows it but nobody cares.
High turnover rate and company ignores true reasons for it or does not care to examine them. This costs company tremendous amount of money and their best talent .