> This i'm skeptical about. Enthusiasm for tricked-out vimrcs, heterodox keyboard layouts, and the like seem evenly distributed across the talent spectrum. If anything, there's a weak negative correlation.
Thanks for your perspective. We may be running in different crowds but tricked-out vimrcs (or even using vim/emacs) haven't ever been that popular around me. Even at Google, there were MacBooks everywhere. There just didn't seem to be any interest in using vim or Linux to signal that you're hardcore, as opposed to actually getting value out of it. At the company I'm currently at, the person generally understood to be the most talented guy on the team I'm joining just happens to be the only one on emacs instead of VScode. To reiterate, all of this is pretty low-confidence for the reasons in my orig comment, but within my small dataset, the correlation has been quite strong.
In my personal experience: I spent an hour writing the base of a customized vimrc one morning at Google at the start of my career. In the years since then, the process has been 1) notice annoyance or repeatable process, 2) spend 5 minutes scripting it, 3) go on with work and life and see a positive ROI usually within weeks (ignoring the much more important benefit of not interrupting my thinking with manual tasks). I do something similar but much more ambitious for my desktop (currently an i3/Debian system that's almost entirely operated by keyboard). This incremental approach has worked out _really_ well for me, and the accumulated effect over the years is a system that's very, very customized to my use-cases and needs. It's to the point that, at the job I just started at, I'm a little in shock to see people stretching a single chrome window across one massive monitor and an IDE across the other, with a dozen floating windows behind each. By contrast, I have 5-7 workspaces in my working set at any time, each one of which has multiple windows in use. Again, I'm pretty sensitive to the risk of feeling productive instead of being productive by building tools that aren't worth it, but the incremental approach generally constrains me to the stuff that I'm sure will be helpful.
(There are of course, places where the value/effort graph has a big discontinuity, and I take the time probably once every ~six months to handle stuff like that, in the form of a mini-project that I do after thinking about whether the ROI would be worth it. I also often get the chance to try my hand at new things in the course of doing so, which helps shift the balance. Eg, right now I'm working on breaking the frustrating interface barrier that Chrome presents: as much as I like the web, shifting so much into the browser and away from the OS/WM has been a giant leap backwards for usability, particularly given how obsessed website designers are with mouse-heavy interfaces)
Thanks for your perspective. We may be running in different crowds but tricked-out vimrcs (or even using vim/emacs) haven't ever been that popular around me. Even at Google, there were MacBooks everywhere. There just didn't seem to be any interest in using vim or Linux to signal that you're hardcore, as opposed to actually getting value out of it. At the company I'm currently at, the person generally understood to be the most talented guy on the team I'm joining just happens to be the only one on emacs instead of VScode. To reiterate, all of this is pretty low-confidence for the reasons in my orig comment, but within my small dataset, the correlation has been quite strong.
In my personal experience: I spent an hour writing the base of a customized vimrc one morning at Google at the start of my career. In the years since then, the process has been 1) notice annoyance or repeatable process, 2) spend 5 minutes scripting it, 3) go on with work and life and see a positive ROI usually within weeks (ignoring the much more important benefit of not interrupting my thinking with manual tasks). I do something similar but much more ambitious for my desktop (currently an i3/Debian system that's almost entirely operated by keyboard). This incremental approach has worked out _really_ well for me, and the accumulated effect over the years is a system that's very, very customized to my use-cases and needs. It's to the point that, at the job I just started at, I'm a little in shock to see people stretching a single chrome window across one massive monitor and an IDE across the other, with a dozen floating windows behind each. By contrast, I have 5-7 workspaces in my working set at any time, each one of which has multiple windows in use. Again, I'm pretty sensitive to the risk of feeling productive instead of being productive by building tools that aren't worth it, but the incremental approach generally constrains me to the stuff that I'm sure will be helpful.
(There are of course, places where the value/effort graph has a big discontinuity, and I take the time probably once every ~six months to handle stuff like that, in the form of a mini-project that I do after thinking about whether the ROI would be worth it. I also often get the chance to try my hand at new things in the course of doing so, which helps shift the balance. Eg, right now I'm working on breaking the frustrating interface barrier that Chrome presents: as much as I like the web, shifting so much into the browser and away from the OS/WM has been a giant leap backwards for usability, particularly given how obsessed website designers are with mouse-heavy interfaces)