
Ask HN: What do you do to make your developers productive? - coding123
I&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>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?<p>I&#x27;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&#x2F;Maven&#x2F;Docker&#x2F;Architecture&#x2F;Test Data.<p>And I want things to go smoothly - it generally does, I think every iteration things are better, but I&#x27;ve definitely noticed most developers don&#x27;t upstart like this. They don&#x27;t try to improve, they don&#x27;t attempt to make sure things are ideal.<p>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.<p>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.<p>So tell me, what does your org do to get this right?
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PaulHoule
You won't find any arguments on an intellectual basis, but as you know, doing
things right in software development is the "path less taken".

