alt Hacker NewsI've worked at a place or three where development environment setup took the better part of two days. Sometimes it was due to shitty proprietary software that nobody had bothered to automate the installation and configuration of. Other times it was due to an accumulation of crufty half-abandoned OSS projects with shell script glue liberally applied to hold it all together. In virtually all cases these environments would break randomly every few months and lead to unnecessary dev downtime.
One place I worked decided that it'd be easier to build an AMI and provision quasi-ephemeral EC2 instances to developers instead of putting the time in to pare down the landfill of dev dependencies they had. This whole process was, of course, orchestrated by a custom CLI that would itself randomly break in odd ways.
Fun times.
Replies
I got let go once because they didn’t have setup instructions and hardcoded their own paths into scripts and things that “worked on their machine”.
The reason they gave was “Unable to perform basic environment setup”.
Some people are just born stupid.
> I've worked at a place or three where development environment setup took the better part of two days.
I feel like this is a real barrier to getting effective contributions from outside of existing team members. Some colleagues seem to see this as an advantage.