Can someone, with senior experience in the whole software development process at a large scale company, come talk some sense into our development managers on how you properly run a development company??

The way we do things is wrong in so many ways, but I can't get trough to them, maybe someone with more authority will.

Like im talking about things like, no version control, being totally blindsighted to technical debt, no code review, telling me we shouldnt use 3rd party tools to track issues, tasks, etc.

Are there like intervention companies for this?

Sometimes the easiest way to get through to these people, is to create the exact situation such tools and lifecycles would prevent occurring.

Why is production down?
I don't know, we can't review who changed something, but if we had "insert VCS here" we would have that overview

Why can't you just restore the database?
we don't have backups, but if we had....

Over time, these things are removed and you have new issues to manifest 😉

@C0D4 Thats the thing, we are running into all these situations, and people from the team have been complaining about it, but the response we get is "fix it/you could have done this better/etc.." mostly hindsight arguments :/

@dakkarant and the issues come up during deployment

Ah, the "fix it" is permission from where I stand 😏

Currently place I work started where you are now, well that and only a prod server so everything was built and tested in prod in real time 🤡

Some of my most successfully bad deployments exist in that time line too.
We (the two devs we were back then) gave up on breaking things in just introduced vcs and started migrating everything across. Over time we went from GitHub being a "backup" to "GitHub" being the source of truth. It sounds like you need to get creative and introduce the tech - given the business / company provides such ambitious autonomy.

@C0D4 Yeah ive tried that too...

Then we get meetings again about how we cant just go do that, or that it has taken up too much time.

"We have to finish up the work for the client first!, then maybe there is time to work on tools"

And that is how we keep raking up tech debt.

@C0D4: The moment you start executing that strategy, all other problems in that company begin to look minuscule next to the malicious employee problem you just became.

@dakkarant then it's an endless loop of disaster 🤷‍♂️

@Oktokolo malicious? It's a fine line I'm sure, but introducing standards isn't exactly malicious 🤷‍♂️

If an employer really wanted to take the high ground on it, it just let the place burn and walk away.

@C0D4: Introducing standards isn't. But "to create the exact situation such tools and lifecycles would prevent occurring" intentionally is malicious without any doubt.

Have you already found someone ?

It sounds like you're facing significant challenges with your team's development practices.

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