Reality: It is true that EVERY organization is broken in some way or another.
You have to find the one that is broken in the way that is tolerable to you.
Arguably the closest we know to a panacea in terms of engineering culture and best practices is Google. And what are they now known for? An inability to ship anything meaningful anymore. Spinning around in circles launching and re-launching new chat apps.
These are not unrelated. High engineering standards are always in tension with product delivery. As a security engineer once told me, "the most secure system is the one that never gets launched into production."
So while Dan is right, and all the examples are right, and things like non-broken builds and a fast CI/CD pipeline are totally achievable, don't learn the WRONG lesson from this which is that when you arrive to a company and notice a bunch of WTFs, the first thing you must do is start fixing them in spite of any old timers who say "Actually that's not as bad as it seems". Sometimes they're wrong. USUALLY, they're right.
You have to find the one that is broken in the way that is tolerable to you.
Arguably the closest we know to a panacea in terms of engineering culture and best practices is Google. And what are they now known for? An inability to ship anything meaningful anymore. Spinning around in circles launching and re-launching new chat apps.
These are not unrelated. High engineering standards are always in tension with product delivery. As a security engineer once told me, "the most secure system is the one that never gets launched into production."
So while Dan is right, and all the examples are right, and things like non-broken builds and a fast CI/CD pipeline are totally achievable, don't learn the WRONG lesson from this which is that when you arrive to a company and notice a bunch of WTFs, the first thing you must do is start fixing them in spite of any old timers who say "Actually that's not as bad as it seems". Sometimes they're wrong. USUALLY, they're right.