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The poor planners are in charge. Usually if you're going to build tests, you'll be doing it on your own time. That's where the 60+ hour work weeks come from.

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If you're not going to build tests, you'll spend 4x in debug sessions and also get "fear of change". I worked in a project where we had 80%+ branches coverage in unit tests and awesome automated regression package for end-to-end. When you have that, you have a luxury to be lazy in predictions what would break if I fix this. 90% of defect were business-related, not stability or functionality issues.

It entirely depends on the culture. In my career I've worked in test centric environments, and I've worked in places were testing was nearly forbidden. You can guess which ones generally run smoother. Some places just really care about cranking code out the door, and the people in charge don't realize how badly they're shooting themselves in the feet. It's more common than you'd think.

But I agree with everything you're saying, which is why I try to get into more test centric cultures when job hunting.

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