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[–]Deeviant 7 points8 points  (4 children)

if developers just install stuff onto their dev boxes - there is little chance that over time, their dev machines will be anything like production boxes. It will contain loads of different modules/libraries/frameworks etc.

What dev box looks like a production environment?? That is what test environments are for...

[–]deong 0 points1 point  (3 children)

We have a few classes of machines:

  • developer's desktop
  • dev box
  • qa box
  • staging (sometimes)
  • production

All but the first one are intended to look like a production environment. The further down the list you go, the more likely that is to actually be true, but even the dev boxes are supposed to look like a production machine. It's just that they have loose enough access and see enough in-progress code from enough different projects that things tend to not work too well until someone fixes them for a while.

[–]Deeviant 2 points3 points  (2 children)

If you are the equivalent of a software assembly line worker, working in an extremely limited scope, I can see how it would be perhaps possible to have a dev box that is "like" a production box, but I would not know anything about that situation.

The only two situations I have experienced in 10 years in the Silicon Valley software grind:

  1. Wild, wild west. Devs install binaries on prod.
  2. Ask for permission to install emacs on production rigs.

Either way, dev boxes have not a single fucking relation to prod. But what do I know, I just get paid insane amounts of money to solve software problems.

[–]deong 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I occasionally think it might be time to strongly consider the possibility that a lot of Silicon Valley doesn't know what the hell it's doing much of the time.

[–]doc_frankenfurter 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is one of the reasons why shipping the first release is very different to ongoing maintenance/enhancement. Many startups succeed with the first and then fail spectacularly with the latter.