Be Aware of the Makefile Effect

At my work I've noticed another contributing factor: tools/systems that devs need to interact with at some point, but otherwise provide little perceived value to learn day-to-day.

Example is build system and CI configuration. We absolutely need these but devs don't think they should be expected to deal with them day to day. CI is perceived as a system that should be "set and forget", like yeah we need it but really I have to learn all this just to build the app? Devs expect it to "just work" and if there are complexities then another team (AKA my role) deals with that. As a result, any time devs interact with the system, there's a high motivation to copy from the last working setup and move on with their day to the "real" work.

The best solution I see is meet the devs halfway. Provide them with tooling that is appropriate simple/complex for the task, provide documentation, minimise belief in "magic". Tools like Make kinda fail here because they are too complex and black-box-like.

If you think `make` is “too complex and black-box-like” then you haven't seen `cmake`.

If you think cmake is a good example of more complex than make, then you haven't seen automake/autoconf. The first thing I thought of. You can find tons of tons of configure scripts that check if you're running ancient versions of Unix, checks that a byte is 8 bits wide, and a ton of other pointless checks. They don't do anything with all that information, don't think for a moment that you can actually build the app on Irix, but the checks for it have been passed along for decades likes junk DNA.

Firstly, automake/autoconf is not `make`, but a different piece of software, and secondly, that you know all those details about it is because it is not black-box-like.