alt Hacker NewsIn my case, I am a very senior member of my team so 25-50% of each day is spent helping and/or teaching teammates. In situations like that, it is useful to be deeply familiar with the tools that your teammates are using so you can tell them exactly what to do.
For example, if I'm teaching a new hire to set up their vscode it is not very helpful to tell them "now you need to activate the python venv". It is much more helpful to be able to tell them "Now we're going to activate the python venv. To do that, open your command palette and search for 'select python interpreter'".
In my personal life, I still exclusively use emacs (which I have scripted to auto-detect venvs) but I put up with using vscode at work to be a greater utility to my team.
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Idunno. I think you end up teaching them nothing and just doing it for them. I mentor plenty folks without learning more than basics of vscode/cursor, and the most important lesson for them is always how to figure out how to do stuff (which has never been easier than today).
I can somewhat sympathize - I guess the debatable aspect is to what extent should you teach?
If someone knows no development tools, then yes, it is good if someone in the team knows Visual Studio Code and can guide them. In my previous job, another senior person knew it and helped out (VSCode was not mandated, and they were free to use some other tool).
I tend to focus on training people on the concepts (code navigation, debugging, version control, etc), and tell them that they're free to use whatever tool they like, but it's on them to learn how to use those tools to apply those concepts. I usually recommend VSCode and tell them there are plenty of videos/sites that explain them.
Then if I see them doing something very inefficiently, I do a quick Google search to see if the more efficient approach is supported in their tool and send them a link.
It's important to hire people who can learn on their own (with guidance on what to learn).
> For example, if I'm teaching a new hire to set up their vscode it is not very helpful to tell them "now you need to activate the python venv". It is much more helpful to be able to tell them "Now we're going to activate the python venv. To do that, open your command palette and search for 'select python interpreter'".
Inspired by a submission some years ago on HN, I came up with a different approach in my last job.
Everything the team did (including onboarding), had to be done via a just[1] recipe. No longer did we rely on outdated docs. just recipes, by definition, cannot be outdated because then we wouldn't be able to do our work.
For onboarding, we had recipes that automated as much of the configuration as possible. For things that required manual work, the recipe would print instructions, and prompt the user to press Enter when they had completed the task.
Sure, onboarding stuff can go stale as people don't onboard often, but we had a policy that if any senior team member had to help a newbie because the recipe was broken, then the senior member needed to fix the recipe and check it in.
I left the job, but I still talk to some of the folks there. They still love the recipes.
At some point, shouldn't installing a venv be a pre-requisite to actually be hired as a dev?
When I've been in that position, I've just trusted junior folks to figure out the tooling-specific way to do things like that, and it's worked out perfectly well. If anything, it leaves people happier and learning more.
And, instead, I can focus on the fuzzier, higher-level things that involve non-trivial tacit knowledge rather than things somebody can resolve with a Google search (or just ask Claude).