The ones I'm thinking of were were in "boring" places like large power companies, and back-end systems for telecom. The stories we heard, which are hard to grok

The ones I'm thinking of were were in "boring" places like large power companies, and back-end systems for telecom. The stories we heard, which are hard to grok now but make sense if you think back to mid-90's hardware, where of multi-day build and test runs causing projects to grind to near halts. Fertile, but painful, soil for the idea of "Refactoring" to take root in.