| > "Most of the time this is determined by if they have technical people in the leadership ranks or not.", can you elaborate a bit on this ? From my experience, non-technical managers often don't realize the importance of these processes. Us programmers know how important is to control how the codebase grows—when there are more than a few programmers touching the code, and when the software keeps growing, a good test suite will prevent the team from having to spend a lot of time trying to change something in the future without breaking anything else (often in vain.) I worked for both kind of people, those who understand and those who don't. I found it was a huge PITA to work for people who don't understand, especially if they can influence the hiring process. They will have a direct impact on the culture of the team, and I don't believe a single developer can change this alone. This is just anecdotal, but the place where I worked for this kind of people just closed the doors; the software grew to a point where it was unmaintanable and, despite all my efforts to convince them on fixing things instead of putting new features like mad, nobody ever listened. Now talk about frustration... Edit: of course I don't believe every non-tech manager is like this. There are those who, despite knowing about nothing when it comes to software development, knows how to identify someone who does, hires this person and trusts their opinion. Basically, people who know what they don't know. |