Hi

There are some major issues in my company regarding practices, procedures and methodologies.

First of all, we're a small firm and there are only 3-4 developers, one of which is our boss who isn't really a programmer, he just chimes in now and then and tries to do code some simple things.

The biggest problems are:

1. Major cowboy coding and lack of methodologies. I've tried explaining to everyone the benefits of TDD and unit testing, but I only got weird looks as if I'm talking nonsense. Even the boss gave me the reaction along the lines of "why do we need that? it's just unnecessary overhead and a waste of time".

2. Nobody uses design patterns. I have to tell people not to write business logic in code behind, I have to remind them not to hardcode concrete implementations and dependencies into classes and cetera. I often feel like a nazi because of this and people think I'm enforcing unnecessary policies and use of design patterns.

3. The biggest problem of all is that people don't even respect common sense security policies. I've noticed that college students who work on tech support use our continuous integration and source control server as a dump to store their music, videos, series they download from torrents and so on. You can imagine the horror when I realized that most of the partition reserved for source control backups was used by entire seasons of TV series and movies.

4. Our development server isn't even connected to an UPS and surge protection. It's just plugged straight into the wall outlet. I asked the boss to buy surge protection, but he said it's unnecessary.

All in all, I like working here because the atmosphere is very relaxed, money is good and we're all like a family (so don't advise me to quit), but I simply don't know how to explain to people that they need to stick to some standards and good practices in IT industry and that they can't behave so irresponsibly.

Thanks for the advice