I worked on one such system (written in Ada, of all things) back when I was a fairly junior developer. I was hired to work on a major effort to port the system from SPARC/Solaris to RHEL/x86 and add some new features. It was designed by a crusty (and eccentric) old architect (who was still around to manage this major refresh project) who ruled with an iron fist, and the project was managed in classic waterfall fashion.
He was not afraid to look you in the eye and say: "Your crappy code is not going into my codebase until you fix X, Y, Z, and change your indents to match the style guide." There were no "unit tests", per se, only a test driver program that he had written himself.
He was a hard guy to like, but I had to admit, that system had a clean, coherent, and modular design the likes of which I haven't seen since.
That would be an ... interesting work environment. Probably the dev version of benevolent dictator, works great until the leader leaves, and the team is left with weaker control structures.
He was not afraid to look you in the eye and say: "Your crappy code is not going into my codebase until you fix X, Y, Z, and change your indents to match the style guide." There were no "unit tests", per se, only a test driver program that he had written himself.
He was a hard guy to like, but I had to admit, that system had a clean, coherent, and modular design the likes of which I haven't seen since.