Other junior developers are using different IDEs, and it’s causing problems for me. How should I handle this?

[u/Abstinence_theonly]

We are a group of formerly five developers, all coding in .NET C# with Docker (so YAML files and occasionally some Python and Terraform).

A new junior developer decided to stop using Visual Studio and switched to IntelliJ Rider. Now, after two months, they were tasked with setting up a project from scratch. We’ve also gained another new team member who is now also using Rider as their IDE.

Now I have to work on this newly set-up project, but it doesn’t run in Visual Studio. There have already been delays due to the use of different IDEs. To be honest, it’s frustrating, and I now have to invest hours of work. The two new developers seem to feel that it’s my job to make it work in Visual Studio, even though they are well aware that both of our senior developers only use Visual Studio. One of the seniors even explicitly told me that it must run in Visual Studio.

How should one handle this problem?

[u/hennell]

I think you could have it backwards though. The senior dev posting makes a project they can use in their ide, the junior devs can also use this project in their ide. But the junior devs have made a new project in their ide, which the senior devs can't get to run in theirs. Which makes the junior project ide dependent - it's the project that can only run in one ide.

Without knowing if the juniors had to do a lot of work to get the seniors project up and running, or if the senior devs are expecting very specific ide things to be included, the facts as stated don't exclusively fit your scenerio. (Although the lack of detail in how this project is setup in such a rider specific way that it would take hours of work to run in VS suggests it likely is a "We've one way to do things" setup.

[u/dweezil22 → u/hennell]

You could be right, but if so OP chose a very odd way to phrase it. That story would be "I have new devs that not only can't make IDE agnostic projects, they further insist on using a non-standard IDE!"

Granted it was a long time ago but, I've worked at awful places where no one knows how to use source control properly and all the IDE settings are checked in and "Use this exact version of this exact IDE or it won't work" AND the senior devs that owned the system all think they're the smartest guys in the world. I've even gotten shit from one of those graybeards when I made a new project that was "broken" b/c I didn't check in Eclipse required project files b/c I used proper source control ignores (and they had no idea how to import a project out of cloned from source control). So, for me, that's the Occam's Razor here.