[rentonl]

This is an interesting conversation and one I think about a lot myself. I currently work for a large-ish company with "quite good" practices, and I often wonder what sorts of policies other companies implement. As you grow in your career and continue to join teams that were better than the last, it's sometimes hard to know if your standards are a product of your career trajectory, or simply a product of the times.

However, I do think there is some mid-ground between what you are used to and what the company currently does. In my opinion, these are the minimum requirements of what a mid-sized company should be doing:

- Version control. No excuses here.

- Code Review. This needs to be done.

- Test frameworks are setup and make it easy for a developer to write and run tests. I wouldn't necessarily get hung up on coverage, but large features should have tests in the PRs, and there should be a good culture of testing within the company.

- A CI pipeline that fails the build if tests or linting fails.

- I wouldn't be too concerned about automated deployment from the CI. This also depends a lot on the type of product. It's much easier to automatically deploy a b2p application than a b2b one that might require proper release correspondence with clients beforehand. I think the minimum here should be a system to handle provisioning and deploying to boxes (whether that be something like ansible or in-house scripts).

I'd be interested to know what others think the benchmark should be for mid-sized companies. One last point: You are in an excellent position to make changes within your company. If the truth of the matter is that your colleagues "just can't imagine another way", then you can work with them to try to get some of these policies implemented. If you can convince them that there are actual benefits to doing their job a different way, then I think they should be receptive. You can come out of this job knowing that you helped level-up the developers and left the company in a better place than when you started.