[kaeawc]

> If there is never enough time to refactor and new features are always being pushed

That is a sign of bad culture, both in engineering and product. Whether its starting a green-field project in a scrappy startup or building yet-another-feature for an established product if the estimates are constantly redlining everyone's available time and never giving thought to maintenance, QA, testing, code review, and testing then of course it will always feel like that. When estimates include that stuff and you show product you can ship features more reliably more often in the long run, they buy into that. If they don't buy into that they are either very delusional, have only worked with absolutely perfect people, or they utterly do not care how many extra hours / stress the lack of quality causes you / the team / the company.

[wolco]

And in a bad culture other priorities can be more important. As an employee your job is to adapt and support the business. Writing tests in a culture that doesn't value the time spent is not helpful.

[nine_k]

The problem is that the "bad culture" wastes more time and mental strain on addressing the consequences of the lack of tests than it would spend maintaining a proper test suite.

This waste exhausts morale.