At the time, I was a junior engineer, barely out of school. This company was run, technically, by people with 30+ years of experience. They preferred manual testing.

Also, I'll add that automated testing was definitely not as much of a thing in 2003 as it is in 2023.

A project manager, probably. "Advocating for XYZ" costs emotional capital that I'm not necessarily willing to devote to a particular project, or to my employer at all.

> What was preventing you from spending more time unit testing code running a billion dollar business?

Presumably they were busy generating billions of dollars of revenue.