Ask HN: How to operate in an environment of broken technical infrastructure?

I need advice on how to operate effectively as a software engineer in an environment where nearly all technical infrastructure is broken. For context, I work in a portion of a large tech company that straddles research and product development. The single biggest problem that I face at work is that nearly every piece of technical infra that our team (and therefore I) owns + rely on is broken. Let me paint a picture of what this looks like on a daily basis–

In order to complete a task for a project, I typically need to invoke a hand-full of binaries that our team owns. My experience shows that the percentage of time that a binary "just works" on the first try is vanishingly small. To say <1% would be a generous view. To be fair, for internal infrastructure "just working" is perhaps an unrealistic expectation. However, the percentage of time that I can get a binary to run after less than an hour of debugging / reading source is probably around 5%. Further still, the percentage of time that I end up spending _several_ days debugging a binary just to get it to run is over 50%.

This results in me feeling awful about my level of productivity, but strangely not many others in my team express this as being a significant problem for them.

What causes this problem is that our team and larger area invests practically zero resources to developing robust infrastructure which leaves us with many half-baked tools written by researchers just trying to perform their single experiment and then move on. Since I joined I have been trying (really really trying) to do what I can to fix broken infra that plagues our team but as an IC that is given zero incentive / time to work on this– its like trying to move the ocean.

My questions are these –

  1) is this kind of environment common for software engineers?
  2) for those of you who have been in such an environment and found a way to be effective: how?