I've seen exactly this situation before and it went to hell pretty quickly. The new engineers genuinely have no idea what they have on their hands until something goes snap. And it will go snap.
Yes you’re not going to get anywhere from inside the system but the system is propped up by a faction of people who have vested interests in making money out of short term thinking.
The only solution is to target those people directly and make it too risky to do business which is environmentally reckless.
Actually the guy who set up Just Stop Oil was interviewed a while back and said it was never about climate but being against the system. Managed to loop a bunch of lunatics into doing his bidding initially.
As for Aileen Getty, I'm on the fence. I think she has good intentions but threw money at these morons.
As for the morons, while I agree the message is good, the approach does nothing but damage the cause. They recently smashed all the pumps at my local petrol station. All that you end up with is pissed off people who associate the cause with negative people. This is a universally downward spiral.
Honestly I don’t write that many tests these days other than integration and functional tests. The assertions are incredibly good at breaking those if anything goes wrong so you need less (unit) test cases. The test cases are always brittle too.
As for strategies, I pepper asserts on inputs and outputs of functions to remove any assumptions about scale and state which are not enforceable by the contract at compile time. Additionally I will tend to assert conditions which need to be in place within the functions. Rarely does anything need any more than that.
Assertions are left in production and any identifiable errors or throws are turned into defects and resolved as priority 1 cases.
As an engineer I regularly get pulled into customer calls.
It's really important to know how disconnected you are from customers. On every single occasion at every organisation I have worked for I have discovered great disparity between the user's desires and problems and what is communicated through the layers.
Layering communication is dangerous!
Also quite frankly sometimes it's only engineering who can turn an angry customer back into a happy one because they are the only people who can really action change.
I have an iPhone 13 Pro. I found that Android is almost a brick the moment you lose an Internet connection where as the iPhone is still productive and I can do stuff offline and it'll sync everything later no problems.
That is a complete dealbreaker for me for Android. Also, Google.
After 23 years now I pretty much use it as it is out of the box and still only know a small subset of commands. It has been my primary editor that entire time other than when I had to work on C# projects. I have never encountered a bug or crash in that period.
VBA is one of the best things Microsoft ever produced from an actual business perspective. The killer problem is that people run any old untrusted shit from anywhere.