I've seen this so many times on consulting gigs and with the occasional new employer. I'm hired because I'm familiar with the technologies they're trying to use, but the first major value I bring to the organization is simply getting some kind of sane process: working version control, automatic builds, test suites, one-button deploys, and so on.

Same, and it's getting really fatiguing. Probably the #1 driver for me to get a side-project off the ground is to finally actually write code and not just play janitor for someone else's mess.

Unfortunately, this is pervasive in the "real world", especially with regard to client-driven (agency) work. Deadlines beat developers almost without fail. I agree that it is destructive short term thinking. Entire weeks of programming can be destroyed in a 15-minute phone call that (re)highlights a limitation clients either didn't account for in their specification (if you can call it that) or just chose to ignore.

This isn't to say that using a language or framework a developer is familiar with is baseless, but I've heard this advice before and see it reinforced often:

1 - Hire people not skills.

2 - Success is 90% preparation.

One of the things you'll learn if you hang around Hacker News/online programming communities is that a lot of the people in those communities are at the top end of the spectrum (there is a degree of self-selection that means a higher proportion I think).

It's pockets of relative sanity in a sea of disaster.

If you're just out of university or read tech blogs or hackernews, you'd think everyone these days is doing TDD, pair programming and agile. The reality is that a lot of major businesses do none of that.

I'm ignoring the approach that says: Let's just spend a LOT of time writing mocks that stub out 90% of everything that matters, and pretend that the tests actually show something that matters.

However, note I'm talking about something way more basic: many business don't do any kind of testing at all that isn't done by people manually trying the system. In the case of internal tools, this "testing" is often done directly by internal users trying to use the tool. This is way more common than one would suspect from reading tech blogs (unless one reads TheDailyWTF, of course).

4 years of no version control, no test environment for at least a year (it was shut down then never turned on again), no written docs, no written tests (and for periods of time, no backups). This software manages and controls 9 figures of USD annually.

The 'bottom line' was/is always "i need a form that does X" and "I need a form/report to show Y". Yes, the immediate short term goals of the business worked.

The entirety of the codebase has been hardcoded to work with library calls that were known tech-dead-ends years ago.

The business now needs someone else to come in and manage things, because the original guy left. The business is now up a proverbial creek, because everything was in someone else's head. TDD/testing/docs externalizes some of that, and does have real business value, but it requires someone to be able to look more than 6 months in to the future with respect to tech decisions.

Their bottom line will be hurt over the next year because they will be needing to pay far more to repair the tech debt, and it will mean fewer new things get done (or.. they'll pay even more for that). So... "business value" needs to be defined as to how you're measuring it, and 'short term' is always easier than 'long term'.

Nobody ever set up source control for the code I had to work on and nobody but me ever worked on it, the others did have source control as far as I know and at least one had 2 people working at a time. We did try to get my using it but it was clunky and didn't last long since it was just me using it.

It seems so strange in hindsight but that whole place was so so different from where I am now.

The "purchased" ones are usually worse than the open source ones (e.g. - Git, SVN et al).

The "ENTERPRISE!!!" devs don't use the system effectively, usually: haul things off to a corner for weeks before doing a single check-in/commit; may or may not know how to branch; bumble with breakage during merge/pull operations; end-run the system by releasing non-compiled files directly to production without saving them in source control.

Source control use is like the other comment about programming language: the main issue is not whether you have used brand X, but whether or not you have a coherent mental model of what the hell you are doing in the first place. That said, there are some BAD commercial source control systems out there, preying upon the "you need this, even/especially if you don't really know why" crowd. These are usually sold to The Management in terms of the control they bring to source control - they will have a trigger to force entry of a trouble/enhancement ticket to go with a check-in/commit. That fact that they suck at source management is of no consequence (e.g. - painfully slow, little to no command line interface for automation, poor research/discovery features, poor branch/merge support, unreliable / data corruption)

It's important to recognize them as bad. It's also important to try to understand what lead to their adoption; often there are ways to work around that and apply a best practice in your area, even if other areas still suffer without it.