Flutterby™! : messed up practices

How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal. I don't think this is a great essay, but one of the challenges in my life right now is trying to work for positive change in an environment in which...

• Everyone logs in to the servers as root.
• The most critical software doesn't have defined release procedures, and as such may or may not end up in version control. And because everyone's in as root, often there's no way to tell who did what.
• The critical error logs are so full of noise that it takes a surge in log activity to alert people, and groups alert other groups to critical errors because they happened to be poking through those.
• Code reviews are largely non-existent.

And... well... there are other challenges. I came into this environment at the urging of another programmer who said "they need a process, we can help develop one". Other programmer left for Google shortly after I started.

I'm now at something of a cusp, and one of the things I'm concerned about is what that essay talks about, where the normalization of bad practices becomes so entrenched that people take those practices from one organization to others.

The company has grown with these practices. All of these practices have perfectly rational sources. The system is mostly working.

But it ain't right.