In the ecosystem I work in, it's normal to have automated tests, it's normal to have a main branch that builds, and it's normal to be able to develop a full feature locally. Plenty of other things that make coding and deployment easier, faster and more reliable, such as using containers, CI/CD, or error reporting are normal too.
However, as you have noticed, all of these things are far from the standard. No tests, code that barely works, devs that are barely able to code, etc. is the standard in many companies.
The people I know who are competent and motivated go down one of two paths:
- either work for a company that values and applies best practices
- or work for a company that doesn't in a role such as an architect, where they have a lot of freedom in what they do, and spend most of their time finding simple ways to make poorly written applications work or writing POCs or starting new projects
To answer your questions:
> I wonder if I'm just holding my peers to standards that are too high? Is it too much to expect tests? Is it too much to expect to be able to test full stack locally?
All of the standards you mention are best practices and are uncontroversial in the sense that they require little engineering effort compared to the benefits they bring.
Whether it's too much to expect or not depends of the context: if management or the more senior developers don't value it I'd say it's too much to expect.
However, if your colleagues aren't opposed to it or it's a school project I'd try to introduce improvements, starting with small things. For example, for the main branch that doesn't build you can explain why it's a problem (e.g. your colleagues will pull main before starting to develop something, and it's not nice to them to leave the project in a state where they have to fix things first), and introduce a solution (for ex. a CI job or a pre-commit hook that checks the project builds).
> Am I an arrogant or am I surrounded by incompetent people?
Some people value other things more than software development, don't mind repetitive work, are less driven, or even less intelligent and it's perfectly OK for them to be this way. So I'd say you're arrogant by judging them too harshly or expecting them to be different. However that's not the important part (though it's still a life lesson that I learnt much too late).
The most important part is that you should surround yourself with competent people so you can have more satisfaction in your work and learn new things.
However, as you have noticed, all of these things are far from the standard. No tests, code that barely works, devs that are barely able to code, etc. is the standard in many companies.
The people I know who are competent and motivated go down one of two paths:
- either work for a company that values and applies best practices - or work for a company that doesn't in a role such as an architect, where they have a lot of freedom in what they do, and spend most of their time finding simple ways to make poorly written applications work or writing POCs or starting new projects
To answer your questions:
> I wonder if I'm just holding my peers to standards that are too high? Is it too much to expect tests? Is it too much to expect to be able to test full stack locally?
All of the standards you mention are best practices and are uncontroversial in the sense that they require little engineering effort compared to the benefits they bring.
Whether it's too much to expect or not depends of the context: if management or the more senior developers don't value it I'd say it's too much to expect.
However, if your colleagues aren't opposed to it or it's a school project I'd try to introduce improvements, starting with small things. For example, for the main branch that doesn't build you can explain why it's a problem (e.g. your colleagues will pull main before starting to develop something, and it's not nice to them to leave the project in a state where they have to fix things first), and introduce a solution (for ex. a CI job or a pre-commit hook that checks the project builds).
> Am I an arrogant or am I surrounded by incompetent people?
Some people value other things more than software development, don't mind repetitive work, are less driven, or even less intelligent and it's perfectly OK for them to be this way. So I'd say you're arrogant by judging them too harshly or expecting them to be different. However that's not the important part (though it's still a life lesson that I learnt much too late).
The most important part is that you should surround yourself with competent people so you can have more satisfaction in your work and learn new things.