I’ve been looking at some job postings and noticed that a fair amount of them list IDEs under the ‘required skills’ section, even for senior positions. This is not localized to one company either, but rather it’s something that comes up once in every few postings.
I am perplexed by this job requirement, as my mentors and some of the best coders I’ve seen in my life were VIM/Emacs ninjas. Similarly, when I work with people I don’t much care what tools they use as long as they are productive on the team.
Can someone please explain the rationale behind hiring managers making IDEs an official job requirement?
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If the organization has standardized on a singular IDE or development environment, then they might call that out in the job description/posting since it’s a skill that would separate one candidate from another during the screening and interviewing process. However, just because it’s a requirement doesn’t mean that it’s really a requirement and companies might hire someone who doesn’t meet every single identified “requirement”.
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In some companies the use of an IDE is standardized.
They expect all coders to use the same IDE and therefore are looking for candidates that are proficient in using it.
Some IDEs provide integrated debugging, code completions, templates, source control and more features, and as such a company may want to ensure an incoming developer known how to use the IDE effectively.
Having said that, most of the time knowing an IDE is not a hard requirement, just a nice to have, as far as the hiring managers and team are concerned. If these are listed as a “must have”, I suspect the hand of people who do not code for a living (HR, recruiters etc…).
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The company may have custom extensions or plug-ins specific to a particular IDE, or more often simply have their workflow defined in terms of IDE capabilities. For example, their standard build tool may directly consume an IDE’s project file, or depend on some particular directory structure. They may also have coding standards that are enforced or checked using a specific IDE option or plug-in.
I wouldn’t read too far into it.
Larger organizations tend to have separate HR and development departments. HR generally has little to no understanding of what the development teams actually need in a candidate, and likewise with the hiring manager understanding what HR needs to vet candidates.
So silly things like an IDE become part of the official requirements as it’s a concrete measure HR can filter against.
If it comes up during the interview, and the hiring manager can’t provide a particular reason why XYZ IDE must be used for development in their shop, then consider that a red flag.
Perhaps they use a very specific IDE (provided by a niche-market vendor for niche-market technologies – I think some SAP tools might count in this area) that takes some time to get good with and they don’t have time to wait for a new hire to catch up. Perhaps they do a lot of tooling/scripting specific to an IDE so they need people with that skill.
I’ve never actually run into these situtions myself (where IDE was listed as a must-have; I’ve seen it often under the “nice-to-have” skills section on a job posting), and I’ve never heard of such a thing being a show-stopper in the hiring process. But that’s just my experience…
I can give you one scenario… I work for a large financial corporation. We have a list of “approved” sofware that we are allowed to install on our machines. That includes development environments. It is a security issue; helps then keep track of possible problems with individual PCs and laptops.
When hiring, the managers have to take into account what IDEs will be available to new employees and of course, if they are nor experienced with what is available, they won’t do much good.
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