I think QA engineering needs to become more widespread. The "extra pair of eyes" can't compare to a department of people dedicated to code review and testing.

I feel like these memes of hating everything other than lone coding is because you keep working for toxic companies.

No, it's because we are working with humans and their deeply flawed organizations. As much as people hate corporations and love startups, both are always a mess. Every organization I've seen from the inside is barely functioning. Cruft, interpersonal conflicts, incompetence, or simply very bad market situations.

Software engineering kind of has to get involved with almost all of that. If you need to get approval from department A and Stacy just keeps changing what she wants, you'll have to carry that chaos into the development and it will usually percolate through half the engineering department, because hardly any interface is actually a stable attack surface. That means meetings, calls, meetings, reviews, meetings, and fucking Stephen again wants to pitch this weird framework he's so in love with, meetings, budget calls, because there's no way, simply changing the field length can take that much work, meetings, .....

Ffs you're programmers, it's probably super easy to get another job. It doesn't have to be like this.

Who's gonna tell them?

While i agree with the principal statement, this also requires two things to work:

First: The scope should be defined properly, so people can contextualize what they are actually doing and reviewing.

Second: If the scope is subject to change, or parts of it are unclear, there needs to be room to consider, develop and try different variants

This is were good management is crucial, which includes giving breathing room at the start. What we tend to experience is the expectation of already good detailed results, that can be finalized but still work if things change significantly.

Also, tests ARE THE code, and equally important too! However so many people make the mistake of writing tests after the function, when the benefit is less immediate. They also have the illusion that they are done and have to do extra work. And since they didn’t write the test first, they most likely wasted a ton of time and energy on extra work of testing changes manually

And isn't testing even more so!?

"Got a sec?"

That would imply that people check your calendar before randomly calling. I get calls on Teams even when setting it to appear offline.

Depends on the team. My team do daily standup and it helps. A lot. "What are you working on today and do you need any help to get it done" is a super powerful question to make sure we're all focusing on the same priorities and sharing the knowledge we have, especially in a team of mixed disciplines.

(Sincerely, someone who doesn't floss)

Not necessarily. Also depends on competency of whoever is looking at using your software/investigating and the legacy of the things you described. A whole different scenario if it's because you forgot to write something in a ticket and someone coming to call for help with docker when you have a docker setup guide they never look at.