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Comment by justin_oaks | Hacker News Reader

I welcome others to share stories of the normalization of deviance in their companies.

One company I worked had no unit tests, no infrastructure as code, and no build server. This held strong for a while until enough developers implemented some unit tests, infrastructure as code (e.g. terraform), and a build server as skunkworks projects. Eventually management tolerated them, but never endorsed them. Some teams at the company still never embraced good practices because it wasn't forced on them.

I guess I've never worked at a company that valued unit tests across the whole of the engineering team. I introduced them and implemented them on my own team, but others ignored it.

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> and no build server

Personal experience is that a build server normalizes deviance. "But it works on the build server" we used to say, as, with time, it become harder and harder to build locally. "Just fix your environment!" we used to say, when it was the build system that was actually at fault. "It's all so fragile, just copy what we've done before!" we then said, repeating the mistakes that made the build system so fragile.

Eventually, the build system moved into a Docker image, where the smells where contained. But I'm still trying to refactor the build system to a portable, modern alternative. If we hadn't had a build server, we'd have fixed these core issues earlier and wouldn't have built on such a bad foundation. Devs should be building systems that work locally: the heterogeneity forces better error handling, the limited resources forces designing better scaleability, and most importantly, it prevents "but it works on the build server!".

"But it works on my macbook" is even worse than "but it works on the build server". If you have a build server you're at least forced to make sure it builds in two places (your own machine and the build server) before you merge rather than only one.

> “But it works on the build server" we used to say, as, with time, it become harder and harder to build locally

This got me puzzled for a couple of minutes. Yeah, that “WTF, WTF” moment. Then I realized that our build “server” comprised of 12 different platforms (luckily reduced to just 6 in the later years), so to pass a build in production was a bit harder than to build locally.

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