Company is going through major changes and it is not going well. Culture is completely broken. Office politics runs rampant throughout company. New external hires are played like pawns in a game between management and staff to undermine each other. Management hire outsiders to expose how poorly current employees are performing relative to industry standards. In response, employees ostracize new hires by ignoring them, not giving them any meaningful work and even being openly hostile towards them. Only way for new hires to survive is to intentionally perform poorly so they don't make their colleagues look bad or to leave the team/company all together