I can somewhat sympathize - I guess the debatable aspect is to what extent should you teach?

If someone knows no development tools, then yes, it is good if someone in the team knows Visual Studio Code and can guide them. In my previous job, another senior person knew it and helped out (VSCode was not mandated, and they were free to use some other tool).

I tend to focus on training people on the concepts (code navigation, debugging, version control, etc), and tell them that they're free to use whatever tool they like, but it's on them to learn how to use those tools to apply those concepts. I usually recommend VSCode and tell them there are plenty of videos/sites that explain them.

Then if I see them doing something very inefficiently, I do a quick Google search to see if the more efficient approach is supported in their tool and send them a link.

It's important to hire people who can learn on their own (with guidance on what to learn).

> For example, if I'm teaching a new hire to set up their vscode it is not very helpful to tell them "now you need to activate the python venv". It is much more helpful to be able to tell them "Now we're going to activate the python venv. To do that, open your command palette and search for 'select python interpreter'".

Inspired by a submission some years ago on HN, I came up with a different approach in my last job.

Everything the team did (including onboarding), had to be done via a just[1] recipe. No longer did we rely on outdated docs. just recipes, by definition, cannot be outdated because then we wouldn't be able to do our work.

For onboarding, we had recipes that automated as much of the configuration as possible. For things that required manual work, the recipe would print instructions, and prompt the user to press Enter when they had completed the task.

Sure, onboarding stuff can go stale as people don't onboard often, but we had a policy that if any senior team member had to help a newbie because the recipe was broken, then the senior member needed to fix the recipe and check it in.

I left the job, but I still talk to some of the folks there. They still love the recipes.

[1] https://github.com/casey/just

In Emacs, Everything Looks Like a Service