Yes, unit tests have their place, but you have to understand why they are needed. To me, it's secondary and has tones of bike shedding in it. Writing tests is

Yes, unit tests have their place, but you have to understand why they are needed. To me, it's secondary and has tones of bike shedding in it. Writing tests is easy, mentally. Getting a good, simple, YAGNI/DRY architecture is more challenging and requires several iterations, something that is resisted if you have to rewrite all your unit tests. Let me put it this way, if you write an architecture that you later don't like, you would be more hesitant to scrap it and start over because all the additional work of the unit tests (especially if you're on a deadline). That's bad. To write a good architecture, a developer must be willing to realize he could have done it better and be willing to tear it down instead of build around the bad architecture. That's how you write 20 year code, which should be almost everyone's goal.