No tests!
Hello I ended up at a cool startup, but the CTO, who is currently leading engineering, doesn’t believe in tests: he says they just slow us down and that developers end up spending all their day fixing tests and making code super abstract so that it’s testable, instead of producing new features. Everyone in the team adapted, so there are basically no tests: people push their code, they manually test it that it works, and move on. Surprisingly, nothing has fallen apart yet. We use C++ so being statically typed it makes the situation a little bit better than using Python or similar, so even without tests we can refactor a little bit without breaking anything. I already talked with the CTO about the value of tests and he just firmly said no, he said we will do that stuff when we’ll be a big company with time to waste. (We’re 30 devs now). Should I just interview and leave?
TIL I could be a CTO.
Yes
Wew, how the fuck did that guy get hired? Yeah you should interview elsewhere; the company will inevitably fall apart and you don't have enough power to fix it.
This. If the business takes off, the whole thing will implode under its own weight because you won’t be able to support the growth. I worked with one such startup where investment and customer interest took off but we simply couldn’t work fast and reliably because of the CTOs choices around testing , and recently had a friend leave an imploding startup for the same reason -they got funding and contracts but couldn’t scale due to tech stack
30 devs is huge team already. This works fine for 2 or 3 devs but at 30 this is a liability for the team and company future
Totally - at 30, this is just going to be unmitigatable disaster when things fall apart.
What the actual fuck
Your cto is an inexperienced moron and the company will fail. Run.
Leave. You are already x days late. x = number of days you have been there.
If you have dev number more than 1, then you'll need test.
May be cto boot camp grad ?
Name and shame.
Doesn’t Facebook test in production and mostly have no automated tests?