A new developer of decent competence in your tech stack should be able to go from zero to first commit in a few hours. If that's not possible then you have a te

A new developer of decent competence in your tech stack should be able to go from zero to first commit in a few hours. If that's not possible then you have a technical debt problem that's probably a smell for other issues in your code base. Sometimes the complexity is unavoidable - e.g. loading some large training data set or a complicated tool chain of some essential libraries - in which case you should automate away as much as possible in build scripts. Sometimes the setup complexity is due to poor maintenance - "we used Gulp 3 years ago, but switched to Webpack last year, and the frontend guys are trying out esbuild, but there's still stuff that's running under Webpack and we need Gulp for these couple old pages over there". Either way, there's no better way to crush the enthusiasm of a new hire than have them bogged down in your shitty install setup on their first day.