[lo_zamoyski]

That doesn't seem like a healthy standard b/c it grounds decision making in appearances rather than principles and prudential judgements. Certainly, such feedback or opinions can be worth considering as a way of getting at what principles are being violated and deciding whether these violations are tolerable or what ought to be done about them. A fresh pair of eyes could help. But an untrained pair of eyes might also not be qualified to discern the right course of action.

[PaulHoule]

Yes and no. But 2/3 of the time the problem is that the company has no documented build process or something obvious like that . They have time to spend 2 years failing to deliver a product because they don't know how to build it, but when somebody asks "How do we build it?" the answer is "Don't waste our time asking stupid questions." Of course they have been wasting time not knowing how to build the system, the guy who started the project might be able to hit F5 in 15 different windows and get it to sorta kinda work, but new hires they are hiring to work on it are quitting right away and somehow they can never get it into production.

There should be no controversy at all that complete instructions for installing everything required for a dev to build the project and work on it should exist and it should be possible to complete this task in hours, not the weeks that it frequently takes. And, no, "docker" is not an answer to this anymore than "The F5 Key is a Build Process"

https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-f5-key-is-not-a-build-proc...

It is not "Docker" that solves the problem, it is the discipline of scripting the image build process into a dockerfile. If you know how to write a dockerfile you can write a bash script that runs in 20 seconds as opposed to having Docker spend 20 minutes downloading images and then crash because of a typo.

You are right that a company might have good reasons for doing things in an unobvious way, but most of the time when nobody at a company claims to understand what the company is doing except for the CEO and people aren't too sure about the CEO, it is the fault of the company lacking alignment, not a natural property of freshers.

[skissane]

> It is not "Docker" that solves the problem, it is the discipline of scripting the image build process into a dockerfile. If you know how to write a dockerfile you can write a bash script that runs in 20 seconds as opposed to having Docker spend 20 minutes downloading images and then crash because of a typo.

The problem is the bash script may end up depending on poorly understood aspects of the local setup (global config files, installed packages, etc) - it might work fine now, but then nobody runs it for 12 months and there’s some churn in personnel and suddenly people are trying to work out why it crashes. Dockerfiles can avoid some of that stuff, although not always (e.g. the common problem that if you don’t fix the versions of packages to be installed, an updated package is released which then breaks the Dockerfile)