One of the worst projects I've ever worked on was a classified project at a large defense contractor. The project team consisted of a software lead, a hardware lead, a software engineer (me) and a hardware engineer. The team leads could not get along and made the team extremely dysfunctional.
The software lead was a sweet little old lady, but she had no technical knowledge whatsoever. I don't know how she ever became a software engineer, much less a technical team lead. She was very good at deferring decisions to other engineers and spouting a lot of non-sense.
The hardware lead was a micro-manager who kept trying to tell us how to write software. This did not sit well with the software lead. If not outright arguments, meetings consisted of them sniping at each other. The hardware engineer and I just looked at each as the leads battled it out. I was only mid-level at the time and didn't have the experience or gumption to call them out. If this happened when I was more senior, I would tear them both a new one for behaving like whiny toddlers.
When the project inevitably fell behind, a senior software engineer and senior hardware engineer were tasked to see what was going on. I knew the senior software engineer from working with him on other projects; he was very good and level-headed. I've never met the senior hardware engineer before and I don't know why, but he came in with a HUGE chip on his shoulder. He was very aggressive and antagonizing, trying to show up the software team, disagreeing with everything we said seemingly just out of spite. He had some deep-seated disdain for the software group is the best way I can describe it. I now suspect some internal politics or previous clash between the senior hardware engineer and software team lead that I was not aware of.
The senior software engineer, seeing how the team leads interacted and how the senior hardware engineer behaved, noped his way out of there. I don't blame him, and I don't know what he reported up the chain, but I believed he said something to management about the dysfunction he saw, because soon after, the project was cancelled.
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