free you from tweaking things and let you focus on getting the job done. my ability to adapt to a foreign environment without frustration is more important tha

free you from tweaking things and let you focus on getting the job done. my ability to adapt to a foreign environment without frustration is more important than the benefits of configuring a local environment to suit my whims This is overly simplistic. It certainly only applies to people spending a lot of time in foreign environments, which is not the norm unless you are doing tech support. I don't know if it's link bait or the penchant for techies to really like black and white simple rules for complicated things when they are even slightly outside their expertise. I don't even believe that anyone thinks this is true. I feel like everyone must know that you can get significant productivity gains by tailoring your environment to the things you do often but that obsessive tweaking of minor settings is a bad trap to fall into. Between those two extremes is where you want to be, where in that spectrum depends on what you do specifically. Welcome to the adult world of complex problems that don't have easy solutions. You are already used to this if you are a developer or sysadmin aren't you? That answer makes for a crap blog post, but does anyone actually disagree that it's the right answer?