A few thoughts:

I can confirm that often “agility” is taken absolutely wrong in the reality of “daily business” — by the management.

To effectively cope with changes flying in “faster than the speed of light” and with the reality that they are submitted ad-hoc, w/o formal specification, is one of the goals of agility (“embrace change”). In fact, the most prominent agile methods like XP or Scrum involve explicit practices to prevent from the chaos that would arise if all “external” changes would strike in unfiltered into the development process.

Management’s task is be to balance protecting development from the chaos of ever changing requirements and allowing for changes in a controlled, organized manner.

Scrum for example allows for changes only at a start of a sprint, i.e. once every month. Anything else must be “queued” in the product backlog. This is essential. Claiming someone is doing Scrum w/o obeying this requirement is self-deception.

In reality (at least as I often observed it), management just loves to walk into the room and drop their newest ideas onto the team, or make last minute changes themselves. I guess it’s because it is much easier, and much more comfortable, to just off-load your brain onto somebody else than to organize and prioritize your thoughts first. (That’s why it’s so great to have an assistant.)

Be that as it may, while external circumstances provide enough opportunity for chaos entering the development, it is often the own management that multiplies the chaos (sometimes because they don’t want to lose face before a customer, but often enough out of an own premature impulse).

On the other hand, while it’s fun to bash about management, there is clearly a certain share of responsibility (or lack of it) on the team to consequently demand a certain level of process stability and working conditions. They treat you like slaves? Don’t let them. Stand together, and say “No” to grievance. They threat to fire you? They can’t fire you all. They threat to fire one of you to make an example? Say that all of you will go if they do. What’s the worst that can happen? If things are so bad, every other day in that job is one more day as a slave… People have fought wars and died to end slavery. Switching employers should be much easier.