Ask HN: What do you do to make your developers productive?

I've been in a lot of different types of shops. One thing I found in common across the board is no shop really dedicates any time to making sure developers are personally productive.

There might be read-me files and hints at setting up a development environment, but have any of your teams gone above and beyond to make sure that a developer can at least: Run, Debug, Install, Test any component without 1) A dependency on other people, 2) A dependency on a specific location or office or network, 3) A dependency on a shared system where your test data can be affected by others.

But I want to know more - what is it specifically that you are all doing to ensure developer productivity: are you asking them if X works for them? Do you test them? Do you hold training sessions?

I'm asking this question because of all the shops I work at I end up being the guy that makes the build, builds out the core code base, sets up the IDE environment files, sets up Git/Maven/Docker/Architecture/Test Data.

And I want things to go smoothly - it generally does, I think every iteration things are better, but I've definitely noticed most developers don't upstart like this. They don't try to improve, they don't attempt to make sure things are ideal.

Instead they code locally, have no way to test locally, debug locally, have no test data add log statements and commit - connect to a shared environment and see if their shit works.

Part of me wants the world of software craft to start at these basics and then work on the product - I believe our productivity gains would be through the roof, but instead I get to hear day in and day out how everyone is stuck.

So tell me, what does your org do to get this right?