People who don't make pull requests and decide to directly merge code should be fired.

Oh god. Especially if they're the technical 'director'

Agreed, i personally use PRs to review my changes in a structured manner. Helps me a lot!

@dmin Yea, proper branching mechanics are already important in small/medium projects, especially if youre dealing with versions. Personally, i use Release and Feature branches and cherrypick bugfixes from master onto releases, then i can file a new tag.