My first job as a "build master", I didn't know any better when I started. They just tossed this responsibility onto me, and taught me how to merge up and down in the tree. It's given me exposure to a lot of different code though. And also showed me why merge up and down was a bad idea. Much more prefer merge down copy up.

Thankfully the projects after that were more sane with merges. Generally it was a common engine used between projects, and the only merges I was handling was pulling from the shared area into the specific project team I was part of.

Only this most recent job put me back in a similar position as my first with merges, but I switched them to merge down and copy up practices. Experience in the past paid off to avoid some pain again


Hehe, indeed. Though to be fair, these developers day to day work in C# and C++, we are a mostly Windows shop expanding a little to other platforms.