I recently joined a rapidly growing startup. In the past 3 months the development team has grown from 4 to 12.  Until now they were very laissez-faire about what developers used to do their work. In fact one of the things I initially found attractive about the company is that most programmers used Linux, or whatever OS they felt best suited their efforts. 

Now orders, without discussion, have come down that everyone is to switch to Eclipse. A fine editor. I prefer SublimeText2, but it's just my personal taste. 

Just to be clear: we are a JS team using Backbone and Eclipse just isn't good at understanding Backbone code.  This means that those on the team who use a /good/ IDE (PHP Storm), have to go back to doing a lot of search-find-oh-wait-where-was-I-three-steps-ago kind of things instead of just ctrl+clicking and using back/ forward - probably diminishing productivity by say 15% and enjoyment by 50%...

Is this a red flag? It seems capricious and unreasonably controlling to tell developers (non-MS) what IDE or tool-sets to use if they are already settled in and productive. 

"Now orders, without discussion, have come down that everyone is to switch to Eclipse."

I think that this is the real red flag. Your team is the expert on software development and the one to be affected by the decision, and yet you did not get to say a word in the discussion that resulted in this order? 

It sounds like over-managing by pointy-haired bosses. Does the decision making person/team have relevant insight for that decision?



Given that the decision makers are qualified enough for such a decision, not asking for the dev team's opinion has at least two shortcomings:


The team does not feel involved. Involving the team should be a priority for management. I would not like to work as a dev somewhere where my opinion about such central issues as IDE is not valued enough to even be asked for. Granted that asking for someone's opinion and then deciding against it may be worse, but in that case I'd expect a solid rationale for that decision.
The management, however experienced, does not work 100% with development of this specific code. Assuming that the people who do don't have interesting insight at all would be naïve. Of course it may be so that the managers had thought of everything the devs come up with, but the only way to know is to ask.

