I'm pretty sure the marketplace has decided that doing things "right" isn't particularly valuable. There are places currently where you'd expect an extremely h

I'm pretty sure the marketplace has decided that doing things "right" isn't particularly valuable. There are places currently where you'd expect an extremely high degree of rigor to be applied to a variety of engineering and technology problems because the potential financial impact of a cluster of interrelated faults would be irreparably financially and reputationally disastrous. But instead you will often find the overwhelming culture is to instead hire legions of employees/contractors ranging from demonstrably incompetent to tacitly complicit in knowingly producing garbage just so long as that garbage can be produced on reliably unrealistic (were any amount of rigor to be applied) timelines, and where the optics of "progress" vastly outweigh the quality of releases. And while none of this would be a spoken or agreed upon culture, the set of incentives in place guarantee that results do not align with the institutional rhetoric. And as much as it pains me personally to see cultures like that (as a 1x engineer who labors naively over correctness in design and implementation)... for the most part I think the marketplace got this right. If you consider realistically that the percentage of software programmers/developers/engineers/architects who work on something truly "mission critical"/"carrier grade"/"matter of life and death" is a rounding error compared to the number which work on the next Dashboards as a Service, or Fitbits for Dogs, or next-gen tween sexting mobile platform, or just toiling away fruitlessly on shelf-ware in large directionless companies surviving on the carcasses of well-heeled dinosaurs in their "enterprise sales channels", then quite obviously doing things "right" comes along with almost no actual value other than just the ability to claim you did it that way. If building most software came with anything remotely resembling the risk and liability of building a high-rise apartment building, or a suspension bridge, or the hydraulic controls of a jetliner, then one would likely see much more common practice, conventions, and thorough auditing of software that gets created. Rather than "best practices" being outliers, they'd be the norm, and they'd be much more codified and immutable than simply the most recent blog post about scar tissue earned from a metaphorical software skyscraper collapsing into The Bay one sunny Tuesday afternoon. As an informal support of the above claim. How many among us have worked on projects which included, as a central pillar of the engineering process and culture, all the following forms of testing... unit, integration, property-based, concolic, end-to-end, chaos, regression, soak, and mutation, and have indefinitely pushed back releases until all those forms of testing could be exercised and validated? Whatever the number I'd wager a year's salary that there are more people who don't even know what most of those things are than the number which have been required to diligently do all of them. Probably by an order of magnitude. If we're talking about mythological 10x unicorns, perhaps we can start with that one?