Totally agree on your comment on agile. It is a blight on our profession. I was having beers with an old friend from undergrad yesterday - our career paths have

Totally agree on your comment on agile. It is a blight on our profession. I was having beers with an old friend from undergrad yesterday - our career paths have taken us very different places. What's common is that both of our employers have been instituting agile in very dysfunctional forms. My friend and I are both in our 30s and we were jokingly thinking how long we can take this crap before we have to either move to management or change careers completely (unlikely since we love tech so much). I would not put unit testing in the same camp - frankly, my employer doesn't care about unit testing at all - to my chagrin. Senior developers sneak in unit tests on the minutes of breathing room we get. I actually got a lecture on "company cares about customer visible features". Well .. you know what? Software that doesn't crash is a pretty darned customer visible feature. What makes me very uncomfortable is that my current situation reminds me of what I saw on the news about the BP oil spill incident. Management asks very pointed and specific questions - engineers answer truthfully. Mgmt makes wild decisions based on half information. I fear this kind of crap is rampant in organizations not run by technical people. Is it any better at places run by technical people? The fundamental problem plaguing our industry is perhaps not agile - that is a mere symptom of it. The core problem IMHO are treating people like cogs and the need to continuously move faster. Rant over. I needed that. Off to sneak in some unit tests.