> I guess my question is why your employer or any other org would not follow the model above?
Frankly, it's because many real-world products are pieced together by some ragtag group of bright people who have been made responsible for things they don't really know all that much about.
The same thing that makes software engineering inviting to autodidacts and outsiders (no guild or license, pragmatic 'can you deliver' hiring) means that quite a lot of it isn't "engineered" at all. There are embarrassing gaps in practice everywhere you might look.
Yep. The philosophy most software seems to be written with is “poke it until it works locally, then ship it!”. Bugs are things you react to when your users complain. Not things you engineer out of your software, or proactively solve.
This works surprisingly well. It certainly makes it easier to get started in software. Well, so long as you don’t mind that most modern software performs terribly compared to what the computer is capable of. And suffers from reliability and security issues.
Counterpoint: It's not not about being an autodidact or an outsider.
I was unlikely to meet any bad coders at work, due to how likely it is they were filtered by the hiring process, and thus I never met anyone writing truly cringe-worthy code in a professional setting.
That was until I decided to go to university for a bit[1]. This is where, for the first time, I met people writing bad code professionally: professors[2]. "Bad" as in best-practices, the code usually worked. I've also seen research projects that managed to turn less than 1k LOC of python into a barely-maintainable mess[3].
I'll put my faith in an autodidact who had to prove themselves with skills and accomplishments alone over someone who got through the door with a university degree.
An autodidact who doesn't care about their craft is not going to make the cut, or shouldn't. If your hiring process doesn't filter those people, why are you wasting your time at a company that probably doesn't know your value?
[1] Free in my country, so not a big deal to attend some lectures besides work. Well, actually I'm paying for it with my taxes, so I might as well use it.
[2] To be fair, the professors teaching in actual CS subjects were alright. Most fields include a few lectures on basic coding though, which were usually beyond disappointing. The non-CS subject that had the most competent coders was mathematics. Worst was economics. Yes, I meandered through a few subjects.
[3] If you do well on some test you'd usually get job offers from professors, asking you to join their research projects. I showed up to interviews out of interest in the subject matter and professors are usually happy to tell you all about it, but wages for students are fixed at the legal minimum wage, so it couldn't ever be a serious consideration for someone already working on the free market.
Frankly, it's because many real-world products are pieced together by some ragtag group of bright people who have been made responsible for things they don't really know all that much about.
The same thing that makes software engineering inviting to autodidacts and outsiders (no guild or license, pragmatic 'can you deliver' hiring) means that quite a lot of it isn't "engineered" at all. There are embarrassing gaps in practice everywhere you might look.