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Comment by lillecarl | Hacker News Reader

This article makes out thousands of engineers that are good enough to qualify at Microsoft and work on Office but haven't used git yet? That sounds a bit overplayed tbh, if you haven't used git you must live under a rock. You can't use Source Depot at home.

Overall good story though

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You’d be surprised at the amount of people at Microsoft that their entire career have been at Microsoft (pre-git-creation) that never used Git. Git is relatively new (2005) but source control systems are not.

That's still two decades. Git is so popular Microsoft bought one of the major forges 7 years ago.

To have never touched it in the last decade? You've got a gap in your CV.

Not everyone wants to code for hobby, so if their work not uses git then they too will not use it.

Not everyone _can_ code as a hobby. Some of us are old and have families and other commitments

That's when you can only hope that your workplace is one that trains - so the investment isn't one sided.

Agreed. In my professional career, the vast majority of devs I've worked with never wrote a single line of code outside of the office.

The same could be said of .NET, Wordpress, or Docker.

Yes? If its in your field, like a webdev who has never touched Wordpress, it can be surprising. An automated tester who has never tried containers also has a problem.

These are young industries. So most hiring teams expect that you take the time to learn new technologies as they become established.

This is one of the problems at big tech - people 10-20 years in and haven't lived in the outside world. It's a hard problem to solve.

I believe it. If you are a die-hard Microsoft person, your view of computing would be radically different from even the average developer today, let alone devs who are used to using FOSS.

Turn it around: If I were to apply for a job at Microsoft, they would probably find that my not using Windows for over twenty years is a gap on my CV (not one I would care to fill, mind).

It would very much depend on the team. There's no shortage of those that ship products for macOS and Linux, and sometimes that can even be the dominant platform.

Something not touched on by others. The standard Microsoft contract outlawed any moonlighting for years, any code you created was potentially going to be claimed by Microsoft - so you didn't feel safe working on side projects or contributing to open source. Open source code was a pariah - you were warned unless you had an exception to never look at any open source code even vaguely related to your projects, including in personal time, for fear of opening up Microsoft to legal trouble.

In the context of this, when and why would the average dev get time to properly use git - no just get a shallow understanding, but use it at the complexity level needed for an large internal mono-repo ported to it.

I've used git Microsoft for years, but using git with Office client is totally different. I believe it's used differently, with very different expecations in Windows.

It's entirely plausible that a long-term engineer at Microsoft wouldn't have have used git. I'm sure a considerable number of software engineers don't program as a hobby.

It only takes a week to learn enough git to get by, and only a month or two to become every-day use proficient. Especially if one is already familiar with perforce, or svn, or other VCS.

Yes, there is a transition, no it isn't really that hard.

Anyone who views lack of git experience as a gap in a CV is selecting for the wrong thing.

Sure you can use Source Depot (actually Perforce) at home: https://www.perforce.com/p/vcs/vc/free-version-control

I think Source Depot is a proprietary fork with a lot of Microsoft-stuff added in.

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