Hacker News Reader

Comment by dbetteridge | Hacker News Reader

Have to say that the company I work for has improved this leaps and bounds in the last 5 years but still has a ways to go.

Macs can be requested for devs but Windows is still the default for users. lots of services being migrated into azure/office365 means no longer needing the VPN for everything

but sharing large files is still primarily done via mapped network drives, which requires the VPN.

Security team unfortunately MITM SSL which means breaking random things like raw files on github (thanks Cisco).

Most of us have the freedom to spin up local vms/docker for dev environments and easy access to AWS and Azure for spinning up test/prod servers.

No real standouts, but the team is great and the work is interesting

EDIT: I should also note, this is an old school engineering firm, not a tech firm. Change is slow but it does happen

View on HN

I realy don't get this fetishization (and I am using this in its medical sense) of macs as laptops/workstations for developers.

You PC (Mac or Wintel) is just something to run your editors xwindows what have you like company C

Mac fetish started when Mac went BSD based, and hardware was higher quality than common company hardware running windows. So developers wanted Mac.

Windows has seen the light and plenty of Unix possibilities on Windows, but they have lost nearly a generation of Developers who don't want to move back.

I personally don't care, I have two macs, one windows, one Ubuntu, and several tablets to work on. OS's are pretty commodified.

WSL2 is extremely recent, so in context of the question, the fetishization of Macs is because using Linux on windows used to be pretty laborious.

Setup a VM, getting networking going on the VM, blah, blah, blah.

Mac actually supported Linux commands, windows didn't.

That or you had a Linux laptop which had a massive overhead in breaking a lot. Never did it myself, but the complaints tended to be that drivers broke constantly and it was hard to use a lot of commercial software, including games.

As far as I remember, it was common even 10 years ago to see Linux users on HN openly say they'd given up on trying to get their soundcard to work as it wasn't worth the hassle as it would just break in 6 months again.

So run an xserver on your pc and work on the development server or your local Linux workstation.

And why would you be running games on your companies Linux systems ?

Hehe, this feels like the typical oblivious hacker answer that begins "So do X complicated thing instead".

People paid for simplicity. Engage your empathetic brain to understand why people don't want to make their lives complicated, instead of trying to invent another jury-rigged workaround.

You can go dig through the HN archives around 2005 when everyone started switching to Macs. You will see the people delighted with their purchase in the comments, how much easier it made developers lives to have a working, powerful laptop that actually supported Linux commands.

UM having a native x access to your dev machines (which are full tech copies of live) is simpler - rather than this more modern method of every one developing locally on different hardware and a different os.

They have good touchpads and touchpad drivers. Other than that, there's not much to set them apart from other laptops.

Except the fact you won't need to restart to install updates every other weekend, worry about driver issues, which of the 457 always-on background services is hogging the CPU, why the video/audio output is suddenly stuttering, why it won't come back from sleep sometimes, it runs *nix and has some of the nicest tooling available both in GUI and CLI form.

I recently switched from mac to windows (nice desktop gaming rig) - and although I ran into a day's worth of issues getting WSL2 setup so I could use Docker - it's been smooth sailing with VSCode otherwise.

Yeah, admittedly wsl has helped on that front.

My main pain points were related to filesystem access, primarily its speed for things like npm install and running test suites.

Though if you're just using a docker image through wsl2, does that alleviate those issues?

Dunno. I also upgraded to those new M2 "hard drives". Right now the docker images are the dependencies (redis, sunspot, PG) and the test suite isn't particularly large, but also isn't particularly optimized (ex: there were a bunch of tests that looked like they were VCR'd, but weren't), so I suspect any speed differences from the file system would be swamped by all that.

I can appreciate wanting a fast NPM install, but how often are you doing that that it's any kind of significant?

To me, Company F (bucket of parts) sounds a lot more enticing than your company.

Have to agree, this really sounds more or less as bad as it gets.

I mean SSL MITM?!

Hey I never said that was a good thing, It's probably my biggest bug-bear and I shout about it regularly at anyone in our IT team who will listen :)

can you bring your own device in? This sounds like the sort of company you have your personal laptop beside your work one and go to that machine to do things like check your email, buy lunch, listen to music.

All while trying to get them to improve their policy, of course.

I've not had the need to do so, there's no issues using work machines for any of the above. The sec team just has some weird ideas on restricting work machines networking.

but yes if we want too there's no rules against using our own machines.

We can login to things like the company github etc using sso/ssh from our own machines, just not the Intranet services.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com