All work environments are absolutely not like that. I've worked in places exactly like that and places nothing like that. I'm pretty sure it depends largely on

All work environments are absolutely not like that. I've worked in places exactly like that and places nothing like that. I'm pretty sure it depends largely on the type of business. Businesses where software makes them money tend to have high code quality and developers that care about that sort of thing. Businesses where software (or IT as they'll call it) is a cost center tend to be like you described. I'm also pretty sure there is a strong correlation between PHP and that type of environment. It's much less common with places that use Ruby/Python/etc. Probably for the reasons Paul Graham wrote about with Python vs Java: http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html