rebootthesystem, you have simultaneously some of the best and worst views on productivity I have ever heard. You seem to understand human factors around burnout and work quite well, but completely misunderstand an engineer's relationship with his or her tools. It is precisely because we are not unskilled factory workers that we can and should each individualize and tune our tools to our liking. I would hope that you at least don't forbid the use of editors such as emacs or vim.
I don't forbid anything at all. All decisions are made as a team. And all have to be justified. I own the company. I am not the king. Yet, with this a given I have yet to run into a single engineer who's suggested we use vim extensivey. It does see use while supporting servers and that's about it.
Don't get me wrong, a nice IDE can be a pleasure to use. Does it make a significance difference in ROI or project timelines? Not at all. If we are working on an IMU for an aerospace project the time spent on the editor is almost a rounding error.
I think a lot of people on HN view the world through web development lenses. That is most certainly not how the rest of the engineering world works. For example, when doing muliti-GHz PCB design you can quite literally blow WEEKS of work if you make a mistake. Weeks. And so the idea of fretting over keystrokes per second or amazing refactoring tools --in that context-- is nothing less than laughable. And that's why, in my world, nobody has ever come up and said "you know, if we took a couple of weeks to get good at vim we could rock this thing". It hasn't come-up because, in our context, like I said, code entry is a rounding error. Nobody cares because it does not matter.
