Discussion on:

Poll: Would you quit a job over the use of certain development technologies?

The main reason I've left IT jobs is due to management problems, but in the background technology has been a reason I was glad to leave them. You might be thinking of this in a different sense. I look at it from a language/API standpoint, not the IDE. As long as you have a command-line compiler and debugger available, you can always get away from a bad IDE. You have to work harder at what you do, but you have more control over the environment.

This won't apply to most developers, or even many development situations, but it's possible to design your way out of a bad situation, and this goes back to my motto of, "It's a matter of how you use technology, not the technology itself." It's more a matter of time than technology. Do you have the time to improve the design of what you are working with? In a lot of situations you don't, or even if you do, the people who come after you may not understand it.

I've told you this story before. I was working on an ASP.Net app. for a customer several years ago. I was using VS.Net's design tools to create what for ASP.Net was a complex web page, and I painted myself into a corner. I got the job done, but it was a total mess internally. I realized later that I could've made the design more sane if I had avoided VS.Net's design tools and created my own class framework to abstract away some of the complexity. I had a chance to do that for a different page in the same app., and I was a lot happier with the outcome. However, I realized there was a reason .Net developers liked programmable code generators. The design made a lot more sense, but the code got very repetitive, and I had to do it all by hand (unless I wanted to use my own money for a code generator, which I didn't). I didn't have time to create my own generator. Just typing out the code (along with copy and paste), while boring, was faster.

I'd be on the job market without a second thought. Would quite 'til I had another one lined up mind...

Just bad I could likely find a way to work-around and live with... at least till I found something better.

However, if it is a combination of bad tools / tech and unrealistic expectations by management I would be gone yesterday. Not worth the stress to stay.

I suppose the first task is to agree on the definition of "really bad". It's been said ad nauseam that real programmers don't use ... I had a boss years ago who believed VisualBasic was the best tool for programming. In the course of my career I've seen only one language I truly disliked, and I am sure that was due to my first exposure to it being very poorly written code.

Company uses PowerBuilder and absolutely hate it. It's a piece of work.

Well everything can be learned, with good practice, nice pick-up, with P A T I E N C E and better understanding of what you're doing, you can do almost everything. Enjoy life - make it easier for you. If you can't, then find another way for you to enjoy it . .