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Comment by kaba0 | Hacker News Reader

I never understood why a company would enforce the use of a specific IDE. If they can’t set up .gitignore files and formatting properly, they should not be doing IT.

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To be fair eclipse and IntelliJ do different things to set up run configurations. Although I'll agree this is a very very bad sign, I left that job as soon as I could. I will say socially they did a lot of fun stuff, we had tons of parties and everything. Felt almost like a college campus, the actual work environment was horrible though.

Standardized IDEs are incredibly important for productivity in complex software projects. Large applications can get to the point where the build system and IDE kind of meld together, and custom IDE plugins are required to navigate or build the code base.

I've worked at a place where developers didn't do any IDE configuration. The IDE (Visual Studio) was customized by another department then was pushed out to developer machines. This meant that developers could focus on building software and not messing around with configuration and plugins. It also ensured that everyone's code compiled the same, ensured library compatibility, etc.

IDEs may not matter so much on small web apps, but one cannot extend that fact to all of software development.

That’s a huge liability/red flag. Builds should be deterministic, and reproducible. An IDE should have no say in that, that’s what build tools are for. That’s just all around terrible. Also, a sane IDE should be able to make use of the config files of the build tool.

I mean, if you say so. Said project has been around for 25+ years, survived a dozen acquisitions, is actively developed by 1000s of developers all over the globe, and has revenues in the $100s of millions. So clearly they are doing something right.

Personally, I loved never fucking around with IDEs.

Just because one aspect is questionable, doesn’t necessarily effect all the other good ones! So good luck with the project!

My experience with build systems tied to specific IDEs is that they 'foster' homogeneity through fear and ignorance of the build process. Any changes along that axis become impossible in practice. On the other hand, text-based build description languages under version control provided a path to understanding and mastery. Even autotools has been better than weird bespoke IDE build integrations.

Also in my experience, "compatibility" is best enforced by API/ABI/FFI contracts, and commitments to support released versions for a given length of time.

>The IDE (Visual Studio) was customized by another department then was pushed out to developer machines.

Even though that may make sense in some large environments it's not something I could put up with. I'd never take a job somewhere like that.

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