What you should be doing outside the CS class and in the so-called "Real World" is "being productive". That usually means screw the warnings, it has to be completed ASAP or we'll find someone "more productive" than you are.

I'm having a sense of humour failure at the moment, so apologies if this was not taken in the spirit it was intended but: that sort of attitude tends to get you eaten by the Real World for breakfast.

I've very recently found myself working for a company that has gone in that direction due to incompetent management and greedy VPs. I and my colleagues have been pressure into fixing bugs with no proper bug report, no access to the production hardware and no integration and test facilities "by lunch time" with all the corner-cutting that implies.

The company is now paying for it, and I am on the verge of accepting a new job with another company.

I don't think you understand the study

I didn't RTFA because I could tell from the summary that it was a lot of nonsense.

or c++

I understand enough about C++ to know to avoid it wherever possible. I freely admit that my brain isn't big enough to fight against C++ with enough perseverance to get it to do anything useful correctly. I'll stick to C and scripting languages thank you very much.

or unit testing.

*cough* Test Driven Development *cough*

To become half way good at C++ you either need to devote you entire life to it over decades (somewhat like a monk) or have an IQ of at least 200. Life's too short and my IQ is miles too low.

Why not just say that you should always build against the latest official working source before checkin? It has nothing to do with unit testing.

It does. You shouldn't be putting in new logic bugs with your deliveries. The code should compile cleanly and you should do due diligence to avoid putting in new bugs.

Bugs are expensive to fix, in terms of debugging time and refactoring of broken code to change additional changes built on top of the broken code.

It's amazing how much real progress you can make if you follow these simple rules.

And of course everyone always builds with the same configuration, same compiler, on the same platform.

Yes, they should, and it should be scripted so that it's trivial so that there's no excuse for not doing it every single time.

Multiple compilers, multiple OSes and multiple binary architectures should all be used and they should all be available to every developer on the network. There should be enough network, storage and CPU capacity to make the builds quick so that there is no excuse for not doing them.

How does a unit test prevent a build error?

Because you have to build your code to run the unit test. The two are (should be) intimately linked. And you should always be building against the latest official working source from the upstream repo.

When in CS, I had a prof that had one rule that for release (not beta/alpha/dev) code, if the code had even a single warning, it was unshippable unless there was an extremely good reason (which would be part of the README) of why it happened. Yes, this was a PITA, but he was trying to teach something that seems to have been lost.

You should be compiling with warnings as errors as soon as you start coding, and you should fix each one as they occur before you move on to write the next line of code.

Putting off fixing these problems leads to bloated and fragile code and wastes much more time debugging and fixing later.

I worked on features that let Visual Studio talk to SAP.

Well, that explains the rest of your post.

what part of this am I not getting?

It's a sign of the times.

Most people just do a "sudo apt-get install" now or click on "Install" in the update manager.

FOSS is mature in that it has a boring, straight-laced, conformist main-stream that caters to 99.9% of the public's needs with unsurprising conventional applications.

We have become institutionalised and the cutting edge has been blunted.

Now? I really won't bother building Windowmaker applets or LibSpinyEchidna.so from source. :-)

I would, if only I had the time these days.

In fact I have some teency tiny scripts for making WINGs into a shared library. I half-wrote a calculator application using it about 8 years ago.

Still using WindowMaker, on Slackware64, but I install the binary package, I don't build from source :-)

Irony upon irony. We're getting this list from a Communist nation

A Communist country where people can own companies and trade stocks and shares?

Publishers aren't Amazon's suppliers: writers are. Publishers are just middle-men who get in the way.

Amazon is a middle-man. It just gets in the way between the creators and consumers.

I think the powers the control the industry's developmental drive are either incompetent or willfully trying to keep the tech moving slowly. this bothers me.

Malice and stupidity. The philosophy is quite simple: "Whatever's cheapest in the short term."

But why doesn't it also work the other way? How come the multi-milion dollar paychecks and share payouts to the board of directors aren't the first thing to go when the company does badly? Its even strictly speaking their fault right? They set policy and direction that resulted in poorer performance, or failed to anticipate changing markets. They did poorly at their jobs.

Because a company is simply a vehicle for putting money (from whatever sources) into the hands of its shareholders. How many times have you heard, "We've broken even despite the downturn" or "We made a profit but good is the enemy of better" and "We must keep paying our investors?"

Everything else is incidental. Everything, especially the workers, who are nothing more than an inconvenient cost to be controlled, at best.

Customer focus? Customers are there to be kept sweet just as much as possible to part with the next wad of cash. Nothing more.

Absolutely everything is about getting as much money into the hands of the "investors" as possible. In a mature market with no space left to grow, the biggest return comes from cutting the cost base. The future (beyond the next quarter's results) is irrelevant, since the investors will cash out at the first sign of trouble and put their money somewhere else.

It never used to be like this. Something happened in the 1980s that started all this off and once-mighty, forward-looking corporations began to wither and die.

Someone broke capitalism.