I’ve converted people by building better systems than they’ve seen before. Some balk, but better than half end up getting it and pitching in.
Ouch. It seems that when a manager sinks some team's velocity by adding a bad developer to it the following reaction is always to add more bad developers so the velocity recovers.
And then when they can't herd all the bad developers around, the obvious next step is to finish destroying everything again by imposing some strict process.
It that were always the case we could bask in the joy that the problem sorted itself out, but alas, there's a lot of crap that keeps on going.
This is traditionally not only with software, but other kinds of companies too.
Some people are just not quality people.
At this conference there's a presentation encouraging "You should finish your software."
If that's all people did that would be 10x better right there.
Ive watched many businesses appreciate the benefits of software quality (happy customers, few incidents, fast feature turnaround) without ascribing it to anything in particular.
Then, when it went away, they chalked up the problems to something else, throwing fixes at it which didnt work.
At no point in time did they accurately perceive what they had or what they lost, even at the point of bankruptcy.
Part of the problem is that the absence of bugs, incidents and delays just feels normal and part of the problem is most people are really bad at detecting second order effects and applying second order fixes. E.g. they think "another developer will fix it" or "devs just need to dedicate more time to manual QA".
Conversely, because it's so hard to see I think it can make a really good competitive moat.