The bubble happens to be at the bottom of everything everyone runs. If we--or kernel folks for that matter--applied the advice of the article to our development practices, our system meltdown would be your system meltdown.

Sure, you have requirements from management. So do architects and engineers for building bridges. Yet they still have a duty to build bridges that don't fall down.

OK, so don't then. You are still in a bubble, important or otherwise. You can't expect me to throw out the service manual for my old Volvo because NASA wouldn't build a space probe to those standards.

Are you suggesting that the Linux kernel is unit tested? Last I checked, I couldn't find them. And discussions online say the same (e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9543336 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9544306). Kernel bugs tend to show up in userspace.

Fortunately, integration-oriented projects have arisen more recently such as https://kernelci.org/ and https://github.com/os-autoinst/openQA/

Anyhow, it would make me a bit sad if the v8 team is writing unit tests tightly coupled to the implementation. I've messed around with the codebase and I didn't see tests like that - could you point to some?

The ones I glanced at appear to test output without much mocking, which isn't as tightly coupled as unit tests commonly end up.

Running against the wall in the enterprise is what management expect but in my experience it’s down to developers “holding their nerve” to use the proper process (unit tests, PRs etc).

It’s not even necessarily experience because I see the experienced devs do this all the time. But your good developer will know that when the feature is so important that it needs “rushing”, aka straight to prod or, skip QA etc then that’s exactly the time to stand firm and write those unit tests instead of throwing crap over the wall and making it next weeks defect.

Enterprise software being known for its code quality.

I find a lot of enterprises follow TDD.

Oh yeah, some are extremely vulnerable to predatory TDD evangelists. You won't find many functional programming ones though.