Love this article, but I'm not sure the origin of the sloppy practices described there always originates with the VP/Eng, CTO or CEO. I've worked with plenty of engineers who just don't want to write tests, or tighten up code, or expend the effort to socialize their ideas/accept others. The higher ups might not have the visibility, inclination (or time!) to focus on those issues and encourage best practices, but I don't always detect acts of commission from them to subvert best practices.
I don't know if he was saying it always originates from the top but more that it's always allowed to perpetuate from there.
If management doesn't have the visibility/inclination/time to peer into problems and gain understanding, they are encouraging whatever has happened to continue happening for better or worse.
Agree with all the responses to my top level comment, in that management is ultimately responsible for setting and maintaining the engineering culture. It can be tough, however, to balance competing (tensioned) requirements - if you have to choose between engineers that follow best practices (user stories, standups, TDD, pairing, etc) and no engineers at all (let's face it, they are scarce today) - what do you do? Wait to hire engineers and let the product deadline slip even further? It's a tough balancing act.
If you have developers who refuse to write tests and can't or won't communicate with the other people on the team, then it's definitely a management problem to not get rid of those people. And the culture of not getting rid of people is definitely one that tends to start pretty high up the chain of command.
