[zug_zug]

> The levels of legibility that companies actually aim for are much more defensible

Many companies run in such a way that there is no bucket for "engineers get to do stuff they know is important x% of the time." So what happens is that things that executives don't understand the significance of all get 0 time allocation. Other teams may be told they aren't allowed to work on something owned by the CI team (again often for legibility reasons).

This is how I work at a "startup" that has just a single test environment that everyone has to share after 10 years of existence.

[ryandrake]

I worked at a small startup-ish company like this: No bug tracking, no source control, no dedicated build machines (builds were published off of a random engineer's laptop, based on whatever code he had on it currently), no tests, no documentation. None of these were seen as important by the CEO (he was not a software guy). He just wanted engineers cramming features all day. When you started talking to him about development process, toolchains, infrastructure, best practices, his eyes would glaze over and ask how this helps him deal with his 5 screaming customers right now.

The CEO definitely felt he needed to be involved with these practices, to forbid them.

[escapedmoose]

Did it work? Did the company fare well?