In my last role as a director of engineering at a startup, I found that a project `flake.nix` file (coupled with simply asking people to use https://determinate

In my last role as a director of engineering at a startup, I found that a project `flake.nix` file (coupled with simply asking people to use https://determinate.systems/posts/determinate-nix-installer/ https://determinate.systems/posts/determinate-nix-installer/ to install Nix) led to the fastest "new-hire-to-able-to-contribute" time of anything I've seen. Unfortunately, after a few hires (hand-picked by me), this is what happened: 1) People didn't want to learn Nix, neither did they want to ask me how to make something work with Nix, neither did they tell me they didn't want to learn Nix. In essence, I told them to set the project up with it, which they'd do (and which would be successful, at least initially), but forgot that I also had to sell them on it. In one case, a developer spent all weekend (of HIS time) uninstalling Nix and making things work using the "usual crap" (as I would call it), all because of an issue I could have fixed in probably 5 minutes if he had just reached out to me (which he did not, to my chagrin). The first time I heard them comment their true feelings on it was when I pushed back regarding this because I would have gladly helped... I've mentioned this on various Slacks to get feedback and people have basically said "you either insist on it and say it's the only supported developer-environment-defining framework, or you will lose control over it" /shrug 2) Developers really like to have control over their own machines (but I failed to assume they'd also want this control over the project dependencies, since, after all, I was the one who decided to control mine with the flake.nix in the first place!) 3) At a startup, execution is everything and time is possibly too short (especially if you have kids) to learn new things that aren't simple, even if better... that unfortunately may include Nix. 4) Nix would also be perfect for deployments... except that there is no (to my knowledge) general-purpose, broadly-accepted way to deploy via Nix, except to convert it to a Docker image and deploy that, which (almost) defeats most of the purpose of Nix. I still believe in Nix but actually trying to use it to "perfectly control" a team's project dependencies (which I will insist it does do, pretty much, better than anything else) has been a mixed bag. And I will still insist that for every 5 minutes spent wrestling with Nix trying to get it to do what you need it to do, you are saving at least an order of magnitude more time spent debugging non-deterministic dependency issues that (as it turns out) were only "accidentally" working in the first place.