> Well... no. Engineers are more efficient in their own styles. Realistically, I've wasted hours setting up my editor at each new job / each project to get on board with the style
I disagree for two reasons:
1. Optimizing for what each dev is used to is optimizing for a local maximum. If they’re THAT good it won’t take them long to adjust to new defaults. Good engineers should be able to pick up a new lang quickly so some changes in the context of a language should not bog them down significantly in the long term.
2. The overly long time it took to set up tooling in a particular company or language do not outweigh the bigger advantage of being able to quickly get a grasp about what a piece of completely unfamiliar code does.
> But the converse: that successful outcomes are also the result of gambles; is not widely appreciated.
This statement however I would challenge: There is the whole ‘build fast and break shit’ culture that bets exactly on that outcome.