Hacker News Reader

Would you consider an engineer who is significantly more productive with CAD software than manual drafting to be a liability? Sure, you want your engineers to know the basics of what they're doing, but why would you choose to throw away that productivity?

View on HN

Its never acceptable as a developer to say "I can't do it, because the IDE is broken" - this is a programmer-smell.

Re: CAD software, I would consider them more productive, but only if they actually knew what the basics were and didn't just depend on the GUI doing all the work. If you can't get underneath the tooling and fix it, then I don't want to work with you, period.

No, but it's plenty acceptable to say "I'll be less productive because the IDE is broken". Even the diehard Java enterprise developers I know can jot down code with a pen and paper if they were absolutely forced to - that doesn't make it a good idea to tell them not to use an IDE in their day-to-day job, nor a language without good IDE support.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com