Title: I have lost perspective on what is reasonable to expect, and need a reality check from HN.<p>Some time ago, I left a large-ish company with what I perceived as overall quite good engineering to join a smaller company. When I say &quot;quite good&quot;, I don&#x27;t mean perfect, but what I consider the basics were there<p>- Code review, where we would consider architectural concerns, failure cases, etc. ensuring maintainability. Shortcuts were taken intentionally with a plan to address them<p>- Test coverage was good enough that you could generally rely on the CI to release to production<p>- Normal development workflow would be to have tests running while developing, adding tests as you introduce functionality. For some projects that didn&#x27;t have adequate test coverage, developing might involve running the service locally and connecting to staging instances of dependencies<p>- Deployments were automated and infrastructure was managed in code<p>Those are what I consider the basics. Other things I don&#x27;t expect from every company and am fine setting up myself as needed.<p>In $current_company, I was surprised that none of the basics were there. All agree to do these things, but with the slightest bit of pressure those principles are gone and people go back to pushing directly to prod, connecting to prod DBs during development, breaking tests, writing spaghetti code with no review, leaving us worse off than we were before. This is frustrating since I see how slow dev is, and I know how fast it is to develop when people write good code with discipline. Most devs in the company don&#x27;t have experience with other kind of environments (even &quot;senior&quot; ones), I think they just can&#x27;t imagine another way. My disappointment isn&#x27;t with the current state, but that people of all levels are making it worse instead of better.<p>These setbacks are demoralizing, but I&#x27;m wondering if my standards are unreasonable. That this is what mid-sized companies are and I just have to endure and keep pushing
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