Comment by noitpmeder
2 days ago
My firm still uses perforce and I can't say anyone likes it at this point. You can almost see the light leaves the eyes of new hires when you tell them we don't use git like the rest of the world.
2 days ago
My firm still uses perforce and I can't say anyone likes it at this point. You can almost see the light leaves the eyes of new hires when you tell them we don't use git like the rest of the world.
Can't say anything about perforce as I've never used it, but I'd give my left nut to get Google's Piper instead of git at work :)
Piper's syntax is Perforce syntax.
I moved to Google from Microsoft and back when employee orientation involved going to Mountain View and going into labs to learn the basics, it was amusing to see fresh college hires confused at not-git while I sat down and said "It's Source Depot, I know this!"[1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFUlAQZB9Ng
I concur. I miss citc & fig.
Yeah it's an issue for new devs for sure. TFA even makes the point, "A lot of people felt refreshed by having better transferable skills to the industry. Our onboarding times were slashed by half".
Interesting to hear it was so much of a problem in terms of onboarding time. Maybe Source Depot was particularly weird, and/or MS were using it in a way that made things particularly complicated? Perforce has never felt especially difficult to use to me, and programmers never seem to have any difficulty with it. Artists and designers seem to pick it up quite quickly too. (By and large, in contrast to programmers, they are less in the habit of putting up with the git style of shit.)
> Interesting to hear it was so much of a problem in terms of onboarding time. Maybe Source Depot was particularly weird, and/or MS were using it in a way that made things particularly complicated?
It was not. It was literally a fork of perforce with executable renamed to sd.exe from p4. Command line was pretty much identical.
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I don't understand this phrase. Can you explain more?
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I cannot believe that new hires would be upset by the choice of version control software. They joined a new company after so many hoops and it's on them for having an open mind towards processes and tools in the new company.
I feel like I’ve got an open mind towards processes and tools; the problem with a company using anything other than Git at this point is that unless they have a good explanation for it, it’s not going to be an indicator that the company compared the relative merits of VCS systems and chose something other than Git - it’s going to be an indicator that the company doesn’t have the bandwidth or political will to modernize legacy processes.
Yeah but as a new hire, one doesn't yet know whether there is a good explanation for using a non-git tool. It takes time to figure that out.
A legacy tool might be bad, or it might be very good but just unpopular. A company that devotes political will to modernize for the sake of modernizing is the kind of craziness we get in the JS ecosystem.
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maybe they're on bazel?
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I almost cried of happiness when we moved to git from SVN on my first job after being there for 6 months
They might not be upset on the first few weeks but after a month or so they will be familiar with the pain.
You bring back some real memories with this phrase.
I recall moving from RCS and CVS and thinking: "Oh, this is a real improvement." (Forgive me; I was young.)
Then, I moved from CVS to SVN and thought: "This is revolutionary. I can rename and merge." (Again, please withhold throwing your tomatoes until the end of the story!)
Later, projects grew large enough, that SVN became horrible because of how I/O worked on my PCs/networks (file by file, long before 1G network to developer PCs and horribly slow spinning disks).
The upgrade to Git was epic. Sure, the commands are weird and complex. More than 10 years later, I still need to lookup a command once a month, but it beats the pants off anything before. Hat tip to all the people (Hamano-san, et al) who have contributed to Git in the last 20 years. My life as a developer is so much better for it.
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Oh a month is definitely enough time.
> I cannot believe that new hires would be upset by the choice of version control software.
I can, if the version control software is just not up to standards.
I absolutely didn’t mind using mercurial/hg, even though I literally haven’t touched it until that point and knew nothing about it, because it is actually pretty good. I like it more than git now.
Git is a decent option that most people would be familiar with, cannot be upset about it either.
On another hand, Source Depot sucked badly, it felt like I had to fight against it the entire time. I wasn’t upset because it was unfamiliar to me. In fact, the more familiar I got with it, the more I disliked it.
You missed the point. The point is, a new hire being asked to use a new version control software likely doesn't know whether the tool is more like hg or more like source depot. It takes times to figure out that. So they need to reserve judgement.
The problem is that you come to a prestigious place like Microsoft and end up using horrible outdated software.
Credit where credit is due at my time at Excel we did improve things a lot (migration from Script# to TypeScript, migration from SourceDepot to git, shorter dev loop and better tooling etc) and a large chunk of development time was spent on developer tooling/happiness.
But it does suck to have to go to one of the old places and use sourcedepot and `osubmit` the "make a change" tool and then go over 16 popups in the "happy path" to submit your patch for review (also done in a weird windows gui review tool)
Git was quite the improvement :D
What's Script#?
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A craftsman appreciates good tools.
Is git a good tool then? Not necessarily. Some still think hg is better. Others think newer tools like jj are even better while being git compatible.
Perforce is sufficiently idiosyncratic that it's kinda annoying even when you remember the likes of SVN. Coming to it from Git is a whole world of pain.
If companies don't cater to the whims of the youth, they'd have to hire... old people
But those cost so much more!
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e-gad!
I worked with someone who was surprised the company didn’t use Bitbucket and Discord. They were unhappy about both.
Discord I get, at least from a community or network effect, but Bitbucket? I can’t figure out why anyone but a CTO looking to save a buck would prefer Bitbucket.
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