As the boss of a company: micro managing your employees to the point where you dictate exactly how they work including their preferences for editing text is an excellent way to lose your best talents, who will likely be quirky and in some cases - possibly this case - know more about this than you do. And no, it is not 'like an electrician refusing to wear protective clothing', it is much more like an electrical engineer that knows when to use auto-routing and when to route things themselves.

Besides, I'd love to see you make your case to HR: "I want to fire this person because they don't edit their text like I do".

Good luck with your career as a boss.

While I wouldn't want to fire someone for using bad/incomplete/incapable tooling, the Nth time someone doesn't follow the style guide (which is automated for everyone else, but not for this guy because his 1337 editor doesn't support it) or leaves bugs in that are caught automatically for everyone else because of editor support it's time to consider if his constant breaking of convention is an issue and he either needs to use more capable tooling or leave.

Less extreme than the previous poster, I'd actually like to provide JetBrains licenses for my teams and strongly suggest using them. The amount of help WebStorm, PyCharm, etc. give is honestly way too much to pass up and the kind of uniformity you can get from everyone using them is great, all out of the box.

I used to only use Vim and Emacs but there's no question they're much more incomplete tools for development. I don't see why one would pass up JetBrains IDEs considering they have a passable Vim mode and for the languages they have plugins and/or product lines for they're just better.

Yes, but that's different. You are judging people by their output, not by their tools, and that's just fine.

I've seen people produce absolute miracles using fairly archaic tools showing a very deep level of understanding of both the problem and the domain. Forcing them into some kind of straightjacket to use 'modern tools' would be the same as taking Itzhak Perlman's Soil Stradivarius away to force him to play on an electric violin just to get with the times.

For things like formatting/finding bugs, shouldn't those be command line tools anyway, so they can be built into your CI?

Even if not, there's no reason not to allow someone to edit text however they like, and then just load their changes into Intellij or whatever to double-check formatting and use its static analysis tools before raising a pull request.

> I don't see why one would pass up JetBrains IDEs considering they have a passable Vim mode and for the languages they have plugins and/or product lines for they're just better.

I use Intellij at work for Java stuff, and I could easily see why someone would want to use something less resource intensive (especially for less IDE-dependent languages than Java). I regularly run into issue where I get pauses while I type.

> I regularly run into issue where I get pauses while I type.

Close your web browser or install "auto tab discard" plugin.

I should clarify. It happens in Intellij, not in the browser.

I can have Intellij, Firefix, and Chrome all open while typing in emacs and no typing pauses at all.

On the other hand, I can run Intellij alone with no other applications open, and still get pauses while typing.

It's an issue with Intellij itself, not a matter of system resources.

That said, at least for Java, I find the benefits outweigh the costs. But I don't find that to be true for any other language I use.

> I don't see why one would pass up JetBrains IDEs considering they have a passable Vim mode ...

Because I am suspicious of "the magic" of those IDEs..

I truly respect the "old" code, I mimic the coding (and naming) styles/conventions of any code that I work on.

My goal is that (except when cheating with git-blame) others cannot divide the code between original and added by me...

And it is definitely NOT a question about cost.. I am willing to (and have) spend a lot of money on good tools.

But for me, 2/3 of my time goes to thinking and 1/3 of my time goes to writing/typing...

This may only apply to junior people. Take James Gosling's super dense style of coding and disregard for style guides. These ultimate geeks would just leave.

I completely understand the position of the person you replied to. One video outlining it is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3XuFr7rw84 . Many people disagree with it but I think thats because they don't imagine being productive without auto-completion.

> If I were a boss of a company and saw one of my employees do this, I would seriously reconsider their employment. Purposely limiting yourself has no place in development.

If I was a boss of a company I would try to judge people based on some objective measure, rather than subjective opinions about how one should be doing things.

I write in languages with and without IDE. With autocompletion, I'm more productive than without. Even in shell I prefer to use autocompletion or two panel file commander, because it lowers burden on my brain. I don't need to spend brain cycles on correctness of typed code. I know names, I type fast, but with Tab it even faster to type, and less error prone.

For example, when I started to use Rust, IDE was not available, so I used plain text editor for about 2 years. When I switched to halfbaked IDE, my productivity is raised because of autocompletion and error checking on the fly.

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3XuFr7rw84

Cool video, thanks. That is going straight to my treasure chest..

So if someone is a solid performer without using autocomplete... would you fire her?

As a boss you would be judging the performance of an employee against the group average -- coding tools be damned.

I think an employee would prefer to be rated on the quality and quantity of their output, not on whether they used autocomplete or not.

Hopefully not quantity as measured by lines-of-code...

Right, not quantity in that sense, but as a fraction of the working product expected of you.

I have known a couple of people who fussed and fussed with little chunks of code until they were little gems, but always missed the big picture and missed deadlines. I have also known a few whose instinct was to write a framework first, and that takes a life of its own; the most egregious one was a CLOS (common lisp) style system using C macros. Debugging was a nightmare.

> If I were a boss of a company

I hope you do your colleagues a favor and never become the boss of a company.

The attitude you have is totally inappropriate to become a boss.

I think that's the point being made, they are not limited by this decision, in fact they find it more efficient.

For me it's the opposite.

When I interview some of the things I look for:

- Are they comfortable and productive in their own coding environment?

- Do they understand the code they are writing?

There are more things I look for, but those two touch upon this... if someone interviewed and were fluently moving around their coding environment and the quality was high and they understood what they were doing (complexity, allocs, maintainability, readability, approach to the problem, etc)... then they'd be hired.

Further, their future perf reviews would never care about this stuff. Or if it did, it's only to say that this is part of the health and wellbeing of the individual who has chosen a work environment in which they are happy and productive - which is a net positive to the company.