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Comment by cultofmetatron | Hacker News Reader

there are plenty of good reasons to use cloud ides. Biggest one being onboarding. New guy joins the team, we can spin up a ready to go system for them to hop in on and start browsing the codebase.

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The last job I had I was thrown head first into things. Here's a guide on how to set up things. Use your ide of choice and you're off and running. You learn quite a bit on day one about the common flow you will be using immediately

Or you spend two days thrashing around because someone forgot to document a hidden dependency and nobody can remember what it is but everyone remembers that they hit it on their first day.

If the "new guy" can't set up their own development environment in a reasonable amount of time, I think you need a stricter interview process.

I need around two days to set up a machine with all the necessary components and settings for our development environment. I wouldn't mind not having to do this for myself or new people.

Woof, most places I've ever worked has a script that I curl and then I'm set up.

That said, I can't speak for the Mac users of the world. I've watched people make $30 an hour hunting down DMGs online...

I work in games, where it's unlikely that you'll have the prerequisites installed for even setting up the dev environment, and where CLI usage is not common. Visual Studio licenses require interactive logins to microsoft accounts, perforce isn't installed by default (and is configured by the GUI often times, requiring things to be set up before syncing) and then syncing the content can take hours - my current projects' workspace is 42GB, and my last project was >150GB.

There's many reasons a "new guy" might not be able to set up a dev environment in what you might call a reasonable amount of time.

- IT doesn't have the hardware ready

- New team member is inexperienced in using an IDE, but the entire development environment setup is GUI based

- New team member is inexperienced in a CLI, but entire dev environment setup is CLI based

- New team member is working from home and hasn't received hardware for new start date on their first day

- New team member is a fresh graduate, and needs actual mentoring and training

- Link rot/outdated documentation on setting up a dev environment.

- New person may not be technical (I work in games, we have artists)

- Working from a location where internet speeds to download a toolchain, OS updates, docker images are slow.

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