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Comment by xrisk | Hacker News Reader

This is more on the banal side, but I just interned at a place with some weird restrictions — Windows machines, you have to remote into them if you want to WFH… stuff that really hampers my productivity.

I’m going to get this stuff sorted out beforehand before working anywhere in the future.

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This is your perogative, but think about it beyond your own setup for a minute: if it's anything other than a new startup where you're managing this all yourself, it's just not worth accomodating everyone's special desires and personal requirements. I wouldn't call those "weird restrictions" outside of the current abnormal hiring market and majority of IT.

Those don't seem like unusual restrictions to me? It's a little odd to not provide a laptop for WFH, but my previous employer had to do that at the start of COVID because most employees had desktops at the time.

Why would you expect to do the company's work on your personal machine?

No. I need to remote into a desktop from my laptop to WFH… which seems unusual to me?

Not unusual in environments with security requirements, as many places don't want code leaving the office/datacenter if they can help it. Some places do it for performance reasons too, as they can just pay $X per hour/month to get devs an instance that's 10x faster than the corporate laptops, and if they break it, they can just generate a new one.

I interned at a bank once where everyone was on Citrix, which was pretty good (they were paying a lot for it to be really good, though).

We use Citrix too. Your choice to call it pretty good is interesting…

It's entirely dependent on hardware. Most installations are either not GPU-accelerated or extremely over-provisioned. A good VDI instance usually costs at least as much as per user as the equivalent desktop PC, if someone started the project because it would be cheaper per user it's a recipe for disaster.

The install at the bank was a bunch of racks filled to the gills with NVIDIA Grid cards and high-end Xeons, and they had a setup in every region they did business in (you could get your instance migrated to another cluster if you had to be in another office to reduce latency, IIRC). It was super interesting to me because it was one of the few times I've seen VDI work right, leaving the only blocker to dev work being the crazy security policies.

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