[ratww]

The thing that the parent poster is trying to point out is that our fancy programmer tools, processes, ceremonies and tests are worse than useless if they get in the way of actual work and make you miserable and unproductive. People leave jobs because of this. People burn out because of this. Companies lose money because of lack of productivity.

This is what this whole thread is about.

If tests are "taking the fun away", like you said, they're shit. Simple as that. Tests are a productivity tool, they're supposed to make your job easier by providing faster feedback. If manual test is faster than automated test, your automated tests are shit. If they're causing developers to write the bare minimum of tests it will only generate a false sense of security. This is even worse than saying "ok we don't have tests, let's be careful and test manually".

It's like that stupid saying that bad documentation is "better than nothing". It's funny how people change their minds when they spend four hours or more on a stupid rabbit hole because of outdated documentation.

On the other hand, one of the best jobs I ever had was maintaining shitty web apps written without source control, tests, documentation, patterns. Thousands of lines of code. Some of them didn't even have source code: I had to decompile the production server DLLs. I don't have any coder friend that got burned out by "bad code". Not having autonomy to improve the bad code, on the other hand, made a lot of them change jobs.