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Comment by throwaway4good | Hacker News Reader

The article is based on the assumption that what developers absolutely need are the overengineered and bureaucratic tools of a big monopoly company wealthy enough to hire the absolutely best for even the most menial task.

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What are the tools used in the most cash-strapped companies facing fierce competition yet prevailing?

Vim, gcc, notepad++, python, mspaint, libre office, gimp,

For some of the things mentioned, got pull. If I want to jump around to see how a function is defined or used, I don’t need to be able to click in the web interface like you can in Critique. Pulling the code locally and using the open source tools I’m already used to works even better.

I agree with what I think is your argument that “bureaucratic” tools used at a company with many thousands of engineers aren’t necessarily appropriate for a much smaller company. For example, the system of ownership by directory in a monorepo alluded to in other comments is unnecessary if you have a handful of engineers or a few dozen. Or the system like their “readability” reviews that you can read about elsewhere online (eg https://www.pullrequest.com/blog/google-code-review-readabil...)

It’s when you get to a bigger size that you (probably) need to worry these cases.

you're assuming the egg is after the chicken. There's a lot to argue for in stating that orgs should create tools to increase the volition of their devs.

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