You are not wrong on average. Last four years I'm lucky enough to just work with one friend and we are following best practices that would put many a big corp

You are not wrong on average. Last four years I'm lucky enough to just work with one friend and we are following best practices that would put many a big corp to shame. Prior to that I worked at a smallish company with 80 devs or so, 5 or 6 doing c++ and we also did a good job and management let us and encouraged us to do the right things. Before that... yep... like you my experience was enforced shortcuts all over the place from a management who didn't have technical understanding and didn't let the professionals they hired make professional decisions which caused much more pain down the road. Almost like a debt you have to repay with interest... but technical!