There's a variety of things you can still do as a middle-tier or above engineer to try to change the situation. (Very junior engineers are advised to A: watch how the situation develops with those poor practices and learn and if ambitious B: find a mid-tier or above engineer to ally with for these matters. You lack the social capital on your own to do much.) In my experience, at least with my development style, writing unit tests is either a net time wash or for larger systems, a net time gain [1], so use them. Even if nobody else runs them, you still get a better system out of them, and you get to run them when somebody complains. You can use analysis tools on your own code. You can set up an instance of a build server even if nobody else has one, and have it monitor your unit tests and other tools and fix things as others hack on your code. Etc. etc.
There's two basic outcomes that can happen here. Either you become a leader, and gradually and often quite begrudgingly at first, people start following when they see how well it works. (Unit tests can be a real eye opener sometimes, especially when you start having reasonable cause to show how the problem is unlikely in your code, being either in the other code or the specifications.) Or you get quashed from above. Contrary to the cynical answer, the latter is not inevitable, but it is certainly a possible outcome. At that point, yeah, it's just time to say you got some valuable experience and move on.
What you MUST NOT do is simply whine... from the point of view of those above, anyhow. Even if it's perfectly sensible complaints from your point of view that are all but objectively correct, it's unlikely to be heard as anything but whining. You need to lead by example. You also very much need to do so with some idea of cost/benefits analysis; you can't go from no discipline at all to a perfectly disciplined project in one step, so consider your steps carefully. Keep them small; stay away from "big rewrites". (Probably the biggest failure case I've seen is someone who thinks that code X is in the wrong paradigm and sets out to entirely rewrite it to make it "better". YMMV but in my personal experience this is usually someone who thinks the code needs to be OO, or a different kind of OO. This is guaranteed failure. Even at surprisingly small scales! You destroy everybody else's knowledge of the code.)
And I'll say it again to underline it... the cynical answer that this is impossible is wrong. It certainly won't be easy, but I can guarantee great growth as a developer if you follow this path, both technically and in dealing with people. Even if you have to change jobs.
As for the bottom line point, arguably you have a duty as a professional developer to be doing this stuff I describe, precisely because it does mean resources are being continuously and avoidably drained on issues that shouldn't exist. If you find yourself unable to discharge it, you should find somewhere you can.
[1]: I like to say that it lets me develop with monotonic forward progress. I even use unit tests during prototype work quite often, after I got sick of the way during prototyping I couldn't count on anything to work, ever, due to changes, and I realized that itself was actually inhibiting my prototyping ability. Sure, sometimes I dump entire subsystems but even then it was usually because the unit tests showed me a fundamental flaw far earlier than the rest of my prototyping would have, and I do so with far more information about the local landscape than I would otherwise have had.
Thanks for this. I have used somewhat similar approach and ended up writing bunch of testing tools for our app over a period. I can see its effectiveness as quite a few people in our team and outside started using them, or made their own copy and modified for their needs. Now I am better off as a developer but appreciation in term monetary compensation / promotion did not come through. However unlike others I do not have option to change jobs due to visa issues etc.
Well, sounds like you're doing your part, it's just the legal system screwing you up.
I wanted to tack on that while the "change jobs for de facto promotion" technique is solid and time tested, doing the sort of stuff I mentioned can help you climb faster. If you're planning on that career path, that's great skill development. You may still advance if you just clock time in before moving on, but you'll find you don't advance as far and that you seem to be getting the same job over and over. (At least, statistically.)
Best of luck with the visa issues. If nothing else, keep an eye on the long term. Development today may still pay off later.
(I mean, don't go crazy. I'm not big into unpaid work. But not all "eight hours" are created equal.)
This is absolutely true. However I just generally dont see the point in 'fighting' superiors... its not that its impossible to fight the system and make things right, its just not a good investment of an individual contributors time and effort. much better investment to move to an organization that is either already aligned with positive processes or actively seeking to improve processes.
There's two basic outcomes that can happen here. Either you become a leader, and gradually and often quite begrudgingly at first, people start following when they see how well it works. (Unit tests can be a real eye opener sometimes, especially when you start having reasonable cause to show how the problem is unlikely in your code, being either in the other code or the specifications.) Or you get quashed from above. Contrary to the cynical answer, the latter is not inevitable, but it is certainly a possible outcome. At that point, yeah, it's just time to say you got some valuable experience and move on.
What you MUST NOT do is simply whine... from the point of view of those above, anyhow. Even if it's perfectly sensible complaints from your point of view that are all but objectively correct, it's unlikely to be heard as anything but whining. You need to lead by example. You also very much need to do so with some idea of cost/benefits analysis; you can't go from no discipline at all to a perfectly disciplined project in one step, so consider your steps carefully. Keep them small; stay away from "big rewrites". (Probably the biggest failure case I've seen is someone who thinks that code X is in the wrong paradigm and sets out to entirely rewrite it to make it "better". YMMV but in my personal experience this is usually someone who thinks the code needs to be OO, or a different kind of OO. This is guaranteed failure. Even at surprisingly small scales! You destroy everybody else's knowledge of the code.)
And I'll say it again to underline it... the cynical answer that this is impossible is wrong. It certainly won't be easy, but I can guarantee great growth as a developer if you follow this path, both technically and in dealing with people. Even if you have to change jobs.
As for the bottom line point, arguably you have a duty as a professional developer to be doing this stuff I describe, precisely because it does mean resources are being continuously and avoidably drained on issues that shouldn't exist. If you find yourself unable to discharge it, you should find somewhere you can.
[1]: I like to say that it lets me develop with monotonic forward progress. I even use unit tests during prototype work quite often, after I got sick of the way during prototyping I couldn't count on anything to work, ever, due to changes, and I realized that itself was actually inhibiting my prototyping ability. Sure, sometimes I dump entire subsystems but even then it was usually because the unit tests showed me a fundamental flaw far earlier than the rest of my prototyping would have, and I do so with far more information about the local landscape than I would otherwise have had.