When we first identify partners or clients, the interview is not unlike a job interview, but one where both parties are the applicant and interviewer. I cannot

When we first identify partners or clients, the interview is not unlike a job interview, but one where both parties are the applicant and interviewer. I cannot count the times when someone from the other side tells me about best practices in coding, CI, covering tests and version management, after which, on inspection of their codebases, they actually do none of these things. The guy at the meeting stage was a higher up tech manager/C(TI)O usually who read all the books and articles but the team is not following those same practices because of various reasons (usually intense time pressure). We now have to demand to see the codebases we are going to work with/against first. Even if we only touch the API in some cases; if the API is built on quicksand then we risk spending a lot of time building something that is not viable but that might not be immediately clear.