There is always politics in any workplace, any organization. My first thought is to have meetings where you and your team make a list of problems that you guys

There is always politics in any workplace, any organization. My first thought is to have meetings where you and your team make a list of problems that you guys are facing (is logging not enough? is disk filling up quickly? is it getting hard to maintain some part of the code, etc). Don't go overboard. People who are much more senior than you are in this organization have pride. Imagine you worked your way up and did most of the coding and suddenly a new hire called your code shitty and ugly and non-functional, that hurt. Also, some people fear of breaking system. School in particular hates it. They don't care; students don't care. If school's portal is down for more than 1 hour, someone is gonna get an ugly call from some executive admin. I can say testing, MVC patterns, all that shit (excuse my french here, in your manager's hypothetical voice) are least priority. What are your priority. Prove SQLi. Then fix it. Are there documentations for how to set up a server running the software you guys are working on? Is it done with a shell script. If so, is it working? Testing and new development patterns shouldn't be your priority. They are cultural. You can't build Rome in one day unless you have all the people behind your back. Scrum style, sure, but do it slowly. Also, this may sound extreme, but sometimes, you need to play a bit dumb. Don't show off. Some people can't face the fact they are out of the league... sometimes playing dumb/doing things a little slow can make things smoother.