It's absolutely shocking how many companies don't understand how important these points on the Joel Test are. I forget who made an amended version of this list to change "best tools money can buy" to "giving developers wide allowance in buying tools and hardware which make their job easier. Sometimes this is a 3rd or 4th monitor; sometimes it's a $1500 chair that is so comfortable and makes back pain disappear so that one can concentrate on a feature/bug fix for hours without needing to get up and stretch (yes, a personal thing for me), or non-standard-issue software/tooling like GitKracken or RedGate or BeyondCompare or Sublime Text....<p>Managers complain about spending so much money that's not in the budget but how much does turnover cost you in terms of lost productivity and recruiting fees?<p>(And speaking of recruiting fees: why are companies willing to pay $20k or more to recruiters but only a $500 for a referral from current employees? Recruiters in the midwest pay $1000 or more for referrals who get hired -- companies are telling their employees that it's in their interest to tell their qualified friend/lead to contact the recruiter instead of doing an internal referral.)
I would like to hear some comments about: "I like having dedicated testers on my team but many places don’t anymore and if you have a good process in place for automated testing you can do just fine."<p>In the 1990s, I recall (perhaps wrongly) one of the Microsoft books talking about one tester for every two developers.<p>At the tail end of the 1990s, I worked as a developer in a group with a QA team, and they caught bugs, including ones where it took me a while to even see there was a bug. Which means that I couldn't have written the tests for them.<p>Nowadays, I do consulting/contract programming, and my clients always do manual testing of what I shipped them, before signing off on the payment. That's in addition to the unit tests I write. And they find bugs.<p>So, what does it mean "if you have a good process in place for automated testing you can do just fine"? Does it mean that it's okay to let your users be your QA group, since there's a process for handling that?<p>Or is it something else I don't know about, given that I'm a one-person developer?