5 ms·
The benefits of knowing your tools extend even beyond your personal productivity. Such knowledge often presents opportunities to save the hides of other individ
by callahad 18y ago
The benefits of knowing your tools extend even beyond your personal productivity. Such knowledge often presents opportunities to save the hides of other individuals.
For instance, I'm in a very, very large company (anyone in law, science, or journalism has used our products). I recently saw three separate requests for ~80 hours and $7000 of contractor time each to manually add serialVersionUIDs to serializable Java classes.
Eclipse, which we're paying* IBM to use, has a nice code refactoring tool that makes the entire process three clicks and about 30 minutes of twiddling your thumbs. I saved one and a half months of FTE time, and $20,000 by simply knowing what the tools we were already paying for could do.
*Yes, I'm aware that Eclipse is Free Software; we're using IBM's rebranded Rational Application Developer. Yes, I'd rather use Eclipse and Tomcat instead of RAD and WAS. No, I'm not bitter.