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Comment by MattGaiser | Hacker News Reader

> Nobody tests, CI automation is unheard of.

This seems like a very dangerous attitude from a plane maker, a drug maker, and a healthcare data provider.

Automated testing is only as good as the tests you write. Most of those industries have very strict formal specification and verification that doesn't lend itself well to the "move fast and break things" attitude of the 2010's web.

In fact, the major health org I am working with second-hand (customer of the company I work for) has a hard code freeze mid-November. The remaining 6 weeks of the year prior to Jan 1 is nothing but QA, then QA'ing bug fixes, rinse and repeat.

It is very un-agile, and it isn't likely to change. The closest they will ever get is back to true waterfall, which is planned iterations.

The agility is a bit irrelevant here- that place still sounds like a good place for automated testing.

They are more documentation driven. Every line of code and every change is meticulously documented and reviewed. This is the pre-agile, pre-automation way of doing things.

Easy - just build everything on top of "enterprise" platforms that offer indemnification clauses. Then nothing is ever your fault, it's always the vendor.

While you joke, at my n-3 job, I was the first hire by a then new director to lead the charge of integration efforts and migrations as they acquired companies. It was a non tech company.

After a few months, I told him and the CTO that they shouldn’t be staffing up a technical team of software developers. It wouldn’t give them an advantage. We transitioned two of the long time Powerbuilder developers who maintained a 20 year old in house EMR to writing reports and overseeing vendors.

We outsourced everything and used COTS and hired contractors when needed.

After that was complete over two years. I walked in and told the director, “you don’t need me anymore you just don’t admit it and are trying to keep me busy”. I had purposefully put myself out of job.

But I had a hell of a story to tell in STAR format when asked at my n-1 job various “tell me about a time when…” interview questions.

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