Clearly you've been in a very positive bubble. I envy you but that's not an experience shared by many.

As a programmer contractor and a guy who sometimes gets called to save small businesses due to stalled development (happened 6 times in my 20y career) I'm absolutely not even opening my laptop anymore -- before I see a written commitment from execs (email is enough; I tag/label those and make sure I can easily find them in the future).

Reasons are extremely simple and self-defensive in nature: execs can and do backtrack from agreements all the time. At the time we arrive in an oral agreement they made 20 other invisible assumptions they never told me about and when one of them turns out to be not true (example: they thought you can get onboarded in 2 days into a system with 5000+ source files and be productive as a full-blown team member on day #3) they start backtracking faster than you can say "that's not professional".

I don't dispute your positive experience. But please be aware that it's not the norm. Most execs out there treat programmers as slaves with big salaries and nothing more, and we get exactly the treatment you might expect when they have that mindset.

Sorry not sorry but I have to save my own arse first; I've been bound to extremely awful contracts when I've been much younger and stupider and I am not allowing that ever again.

I can single-handedly make a business succeed with technology, and I have done so. I am not staying anywhere where execs hand-away everything with "should be simple and quick, right? k thx bye".

Thanks, that’s what I was aiming for. It’s kind of a litmus test what kind of professionalism you can expect in a place – if any. Especially when they have shown prior incompetence, as in OP’s example.

In all honesty, given that example, if I didn’t get immediate buy-in, I’d throw the towel right then. Over 15 years of experience show that train wrecks only ever get fixed when they are recognized as such from the start.

> You can’t run a company on that kind of deep mistrust.

Trust has to be earned in some ways (but you can expect some base-level). But I want to argue on another point: as an exec, you can use this kind of writing to also get commitment from the team, to balance things out. But ofc for that there needs to be a fair discussion of priorities and once you have that, there is usually no reason to contractify the outcome.

>if I was an exec at a company and the new IT lead wants me to commit, in writing, to XYZ, I’d not keep them around long. You can’t run a company on that kind of deep mistrust.

Emails are writing, if you're imagining the IT lead walking in with a paper contract I see why you would say that.

That's essentially what the GP was implying, "Have everything in writing, complete with date and signatures."

Nowhere were contracts mentioned. A proper proposal, for example, always has a date and to sign it if agreed to is just professional conduct. I’d be wary of any exec not willing to do that. Instant red flag.

That’s what a proposal is too, it’s not necessarily a demand

That's fair. I've worked at more established places with formal design doc/RFC and sign off processes and it can work well.

After reading the description of the SOP at this shop, the idea that the OP would be able to introduce an additional layer of process requiring multiple stakeholders and management seemed like a bridge too far in my mind :).

Do leads not write proposals or RFCs? I’m not sure why you wouldn’t keep them around long if they laid out their plans in a clear way, and then pitched it to others