Bertram Scharpf wrote:
Hi,
first thank you all very much for the backings. I'm on the
way losing trust in my own mind.
Could this be normal? I've been in two jobs during the past
year and not one of these well-paid colleagues calling
themselves degreed software engineers does even know about
Vim (neither Emacs). None of them is having Linux at home.
Extrapolating from this I don't expect my next job being
much better.
Is this a problem typical to Germany?
On my first job, my supervisor described a problem they were
having with their database files. The issue arose from the
fact that integer values were sometimes stored rationally (as
32-bit quantities), and sometimes stored as character strings.
The proposed solution was to always store them as character
strings. Although that strikes me as a bizarre solution, the
worst part was his description of the problem. He said something
along the lines of, "sometimes our numbers are stored in this
weird format", by which he was referring to the concept of
binary representation of numbers. He didn't understand the
basic concept of counting in base 2. How can a person working
professionally with a computer not understand something so
fundamental?
Getting back to your original post, I am constantly amazed at
the number of people who criticize me for using vim, but can't
even use their own editor with any degree of competence. Just
watching them navigate in a buffer is painful. With regard
to your boss wanting to force you to use a new tool, maybe you
could suggest a friendly competition. If you can demonstrate
that you can edit files more efficiently, maybe he'll force
the rest of the office to switch to vi! (Highly unlikely,
and undesirable, but at the very least you might be able
to demonstrate that making you change is just friggin' stupid.)
