The book "Working Effectively with Legacy Code" by Michael C Feathers is an excellent book in which he talks about, amongst other things, a process of selling the concept of proper unit testing to teams. And how he's managed it in the past.
Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?
11–20 of 306 posts
Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?
#12No, i would say that your standards are quite reasonable. I would also say that there are many companies that do not meet those standards. Usually they have no excuse for doing so, just that no one there knows or most likely just don't care.
There are also many companies that go overboard with their code review and tests, get none of the intended gains, produce more slowly than they can, because of an attempt to cater to the lowest denominator. But I suppose if you're going to pick one of two extremes, that would still tend to be the lesser of two evils.
Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?
#13Oh my. Run away.
If that is their current culture, there will be a lot of pushback if you want to initiate changes. Especially among the senior (responsible for the mess) ones who get defensive real fast.
Maybe ask more about how their engineering culture is next time around during interviews.
Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?
#14Your standards are very reasonable. You should keep pushing for higher standards. Preferably these also should be enforced technically. I.e., it should just not be possible to push something to development without code review. At first you can also just make sure you have good quality in the parts of the application that you are working on. It will at some point become quite noticeable that thing are going better there. I.e., the tests will catch something that would have otherwise failed in production. This can work as an eye-opener.
Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?
#15Those seem like reasonable policies to aim for. What isn't immediately clear is whether they are missing because of a lack of understanding or a lack of willingness to change.
If it's the former and you've come into the small company with more experience than most people there, you might get a long way and become quite popular with your colleagues if you share the benefit of that experience intelligently. For example, with the agreement of the senior people, you could show everyone how to set up a good CI system or automated deployments, if that's something you know how to do and they don't. These kinds of things tend to have obvious benefits once they're up and running, but setting them up in the first place can be a barrier depending on what else you're using, how everything you've already got fits together, and of course the level of knowledge and awareness of the people working on it.
On the other hand, if everyone is well aware that they should be doing something and they know how to but just can't be bothered, that's a cultural problem that you're unlikely to be able to change as the newbie. Probably no-one else is either, unless they're doing it from the top down and have hiring and firing privileges to force the issue by bringing in more people who expect it and, if necessary, letting go anyone who stubbornly refuses to engage. If this is the environment you're in, unfortunately putting up with it or getting out are probably your only certain options.
Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?
#16This seems below average. No tests or code reviews is common but pushing directly to prod or connecting to prod databases is unusual. It seems you've gone from one extreme to the other. From what I've seen, even at companies were people work in silos producing untested spaghetti code, production is protected. In any case, among small companies, you'll have a hard time finding the same level of quality you were used to. I'm not saying they don't exist but I'd say it might be 10% of them.
Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?
#17No, i would say that your standards are quite reasonable. I would also say that there are many companies that do not meet those standards. Usually they have no excuse for doing so, just that no one there knows or most likely just don't care. There are also many companies that go overboard with their code review and tests, get none of the intended gains, produce more slowly than they can, because of an attempt to cate…
There are also many companies that go overboard with their code review and tests, get none of the intended gains, produce more slowly than they can, because of an attempt to cater to the lowest denominator. But I suppose if you're going to pick one of two extremes, that would still tend to be the lesser of two evils.
I'm not sure that's necessarily the case. IME, not much will kill both the pace of development and team morale faster than poorly conducted, heavyweight code reviews, but one of the few things that will is a dogmatic requirement to have some unnecessarily high level of code coverage in a test suite where everyone is just writing make-work tests to get the number up.
Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?
#18Would you say its good practice to ask specific questions to uncover the problems mentioned in the OP at the interview stage?
Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?
#19Oh my. Run away. If that is their current culture, there will be a lot of pushback if you want to initiate changes. Especially among the senior (responsible for the mess) ones who get defensive real fast. Maybe ask more about how their engineering culture is next time around during interviews.
Unfortunately I have to second this advice. There's very little chance you'll be able to make things change so better to move on now than when you're depressed in a few months or years.
Re: Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?
#20This is an engineering leadership problem. Your new company does not seem to have an engineering leader who understands the cost to the business of having the engineers act the way they currently are. I don't think you have to run away, and you don't have to become such a leader yourself, but you should talk with your leadership and show them why what the team is doing now is not good. Make sure to first understand what your leadership values, then present to them better ways of doing engineering where you show the impact it has on the things they value.
So like for automated tests if the leadership currently thinks that test code isn't actually doing anything for the customer so why should it be done? Then you have to show how much money/time/whatever has been spent by engineering fixing the same bug over and over because you lack regression tests and compare that to how much would have been spent to write a test case for that regression.