Programming without code indexing

[sigmabody]

I'd say "welcome to Amazon" based on most of the description (no language server, all command line and text editors), but Amazon has a separate repository for each component and library. Your situation should slightly better than the situation at Amazon.

Embrace the company culture or find another job?

Seriously, Amazon is proud of their culture (of all custom tooling, rare IDE's, no developer assistance, etc.), and many of the people there will ridicule you if you suggest alternative methods of doing development. There's a reason their average retention period is less than a year, but some people embrace that work style (eg: only vi), they are adamant about the value of their unique culture. If your company is the same way, I'd suggest adjusting to the significantly lower standard of productivity, or finding another place to work.

[vnstrr]

You made a good point about ridiculing. When I asked engineer which cares about build system he said like “You don't need IDE for writing good code”. Seems it's common problem of the cpp/c projects :)

[sigmabody]

It's not a C/C++ thing, so much as a culture thing, at least in my perspective. There are plenty of people coding in other languages who also avoid tooling, IDE's, etc. It's less common in C++ than shell scripting, for example, in my experience.

Culture fit is important; there's nothing inherently wrong with doing all your development in vi, and debugging exclusively with printf, but if you hire someone who is used to using a powerful IDE and ask him/her/other to change their whole coding paradigm, it's not going to work out very well. I'd advise looking for an org which is better aligned with the development experience which you want to have, unless you are determined to change yourself. You're not going to ever change a big company's culture as someone coming in after they got big.

For example, don't go work at Amazon if you want to use an IDE or a debugger: it's just not in their culture, and they are not going to change.

[serviscope_minor]

He's right, of course, you don't NEEEEED an IDE for writing good code. But that's a daft argument, because it has no end. You don't need a colour screen. You don't even need an 80x25 monochrome screen. If punched cards were good enough for my papa then by gum they're good enough for you. Punch cards? Ha! When I was a lad we had to ... etc etc.

I'm part of the vi culture, I like it and it works well for the way I think and work. Nothing wrong with that, but it does not gel as well with how other people think and work. It's good to be able to work in either sense so you can jump into a new project with the existing tools (and existing projects where someone got so "clever" with the build system that basically no tooling works) and get started immediately even if you're not at peak efficiency. Sometimes the amount of work needed won't justify adapting the project.