It amazed me when a dev on one of my teams put up a code review, no tests (to be added "during the QE pass later" (a practice that itself has issues but in this

It amazed me when a dev on one of my teams put up a code review, no tests (to be added "during the QE pass later" (a practice that itself has issues but in this case was at least plausible)), but from my quick inspection couldn't possibly work. So I download the patch, built it into my local app, test it.. and yeah, it doesn't work. At that point it was faster for me to actually make it work and just submit the new diff instead of do the back-and-forth dance over code review. My team did pretty good on reporting the time spent (sunk) to BS like infrastructure, flaky tests (especially those involving complex selenium automation which additionally suck for speed because they require the whole app to be running), and out-of-our-team's-hands problems in the wider company. I think it helped that the most senior devs ran into the same problems and felt fine complaining about them as a way to explain why something is taking longer than might otherwise be expected. We also had interns every summer to run into problems that hadn't been fixed and we had just grown accustomed to or found our own mitigations. Sometimes it's just a knowledge issue, being honest about it means someone might be able to help. Even new members with "lead engineer" in their title can learn new things that were taught to the last crop of interns and be more productive. There is a downside risk in that the excuses can be taken advantage of and someone can get away with doing pretty much no code work for days. The excuses can also be taken advantage of to get some various work in that doesn't nicely fit into its own work ticket, though... Some slack in orgs is important and comes in various forms. Property testing helps cover some cases you don't fully anticipate. It's worth integrating a library (https://hypothesis.works/articles/quickcheck-in-every-language/ https://hypothesis.works/articles/quickcheck-in-every-langua... is old but at least points to a bunch for different languages) into the automation infrastructure even if it's not used all that often.