I used to be in favour of software development departments dictating the IDE to developers - this way, everybody would be using the same IDE, they could all learn from each other, help each other, use the same configuration, and work in a consistent environment.

Lately though, I've been questioning this line of thought - in practice I've very rarely benefited from the assumptions above. Maven can generate the settings for the major IDEs and I've never been in a situation where pair programming has ever been used.

How do you feel about this issue?