The benefits of knowing your tools extend even beyond your personal productivity. Such knowledge often presents opportunities to save the hides of other individuals.
For instance, I'm in a very, very large company (anyone in law, science, or journalism has used our products). I recently saw three separate requests for ~80 hours and $7000 of contractor time each to manually add serialVersionUIDs to serializable Java classes.
Eclipse, which we're paying* IBM to use, has a nice code refactoring tool that makes the entire process three clicks and about 30 minutes of twiddling your thumbs. I saved one and a half months of FTE time, and $20,000 by simply knowing what the tools we were already paying for could do.
*Yes, I'm aware that Eclipse is Free Software; we're using IBM's rebranded Rational Application Developer. Yes, I'd rather use Eclipse and Tomcat instead of RAD and WAS. No, I'm not bitter.
For instance, I'm in a very, very large company (anyone in law, science, or journalism has used our products). I recently saw three separate requests for ~80 hours and $7000 of contractor time each to manually add serialVersionUIDs to serializable Java classes.
Eclipse, which we're paying* IBM to use, has a nice code refactoring tool that makes the entire process three clicks and about 30 minutes of twiddling your thumbs. I saved one and a half months of FTE time, and $20,000 by simply knowing what the tools we were already paying for could do.
*Yes, I'm aware that Eclipse is Free Software; we're using IBM's rebranded Rational Application Developer. Yes, I'd rather use Eclipse and Tomcat instead of RAD and WAS. No, I'm not bitter.