> But of course, "doing things the right way" is terribly hard to quantify

I don’t think it is hard to quantify actually, shorter build times are better than longer ones, branch merges that take seconds are better than the ones that take up to a day, spending people’s time on higher level thought processes vs squandering their time going through pages of manual steps that could just be a script, etc. It’s just a lack of awareness of what the company is doing that turns them into molasses, and puts projects at risk of being canceled. The companies are still successful overall somehow, but individual employees learn and grow at a much slower pace than they’re capable of.