I know a contractor who has worked for a major company that I won't name. He has told me that their source control was, for a time, Google Drive. He knew it was a recipe for disaster but real work was nonetheless getting done, and the client was satisfied. They didn't know how the sausage was being made, but they liked the output.
I think a lot of people who haven't been around the scene wouldn't believe these stories, but this stuff happens a lot. Like major commercial projects with no tests whatsoever (unit, integration, or otherwise), that are still successful and making a lot of money.
Not surprised. A lot of this stuff doesn't get set up because people are lazy. Or developers don't want to, or are unable to, do sysadmin work.
I worked at a small "startup" inside a larger, several billion dollar company, back in the late 90's. Nobody set up source control for that division, despite the parent company being over two decades old and having people very experienced with that sort of thing. We were also integrating code from third party contractors, and it was a big mess. Files getting overwritten, people copying stuff off their local desktops, consultants FTPing in updates, etc. After a couple months of copying junk everywhere, I finally got fed up. As a 22 year old, basically straight out of college, I was training the entire team how to use CVS...
Exactly. When people say 'before we had version control' I want to ask, how old are you? And by the way, I am older than just about all of you.
Started with SCCS with versioned control lists to determine what got pulled from SCCS. The outer wrapper was all written in shell. 1980s.
Talking about a large system, eight or ten sub projects, each sub project in its own versioned source tree.
A release spec pulled the SCCS deltas of all the sub project control lists, and then SCCS was directed by those versioned control lists to pull all the source code for each sub project.
So yes, version control that I am aware of was firmly entrenched in 1980. And I am certain it goes back further than that.
I think a lot of people who haven't been around the scene wouldn't believe these stories, but this stuff happens a lot. Like major commercial projects with no tests whatsoever (unit, integration, or otherwise), that are still successful and making a lot of money.