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Comment by 0xmarcin | Hacker News Reader

I have a person on my team that does not want to use IntelliJ (we are doing Java), instead it relies on VSCode although the company paid for IJ license. Is this a symptom of strong preferences or being immature? Probably both.

I don't want to use Windows, when I hunt for jobs I avoid jobs that do not offer mac/linux laptop. This is probably immature (or as programmers we are simply spoiled).

There is hype. Some people that for 10+ years where writing Java are jumping ships to learn Go. Go is like Java 1.6, the error handling is cumbersome. Yet all those people say the simpler language is the better. They are the same people that a few years ago were cheering for functional programming in Java and streams...

Finally we have this cult of x10 programmer, being oncall 24/7, macho work ethic (workaholism) and changing the world. Seems like kids gone wild.

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>I don't want to use Windows, when I hunt for jobs I avoid jobs that do not offer mac/linux laptop. This is probably immature.

I don't think that is immature at all. As a professional it is perfectly reasonable to expect to have good tools. If, for what your job involves, Linux / Mac is significantly better (for you) you are right to insist on it.

If you were applying for jobs as a carpenter you'd be right to ignore any that only provided a hammer.

Avoiding jobs that use [this/that os/dx] is not immature at all, it's reasonable. What's immature is joining a [this os] shop and demand to get a machine with [that os] and start to convert the team "to the right path" with a condescending attitude.

I'm not a programmer, but I am an engineer with very strong opinions on, and preferences for, objects/tools I interact with. I don't think your preference for avoiding jobs that would require you to use Windows is immature. The tools we use affect our output. Especially digital tools because they're extensions of how we think.

Some folk view and use cars as A to B transportation, and some care about how wheel camber angles affect driving dynamics. Ultimately, it boils down to taste, knowledge, nuance.

> I don't want to use Windows, when I hunt for jobs I avoid jobs that do not offer mac/linux laptop. This is probably immature

I dont think the windows in itself is the issue here. To my experience, when the employer enforces the use of windows, its because you really cannot use something else to do your work because of some specific network policies which disallow you to connect to the network itself. Also the use of windows goes usually hand in hand with other stupid policies, which forbid you to do anything on your computer which is not part of the job. Sometimes it goes as far as not allowing you to change your wallpaper or restarting your computer in the middle of your work without even warning you every day. I don't blame people for choosing to work in other companies where they don't have to fight the security department when they need to install the basic tools for their job. The tooling you use should be decided on the team level, not the whole company level.

I think wanting to avoid Windows or having took preferences is immature. If it is then I don’t know we what “immature” means. There are civil engineers that have tool preferences and also type-of-work preferences, are they immature?

Why do you consider it immature to have tooling preferences, in cases where your tooling choices don't affect others?

I see no reason to assume all brains will work equally well with every workflow. The important thing is what gets checked into the repository, not the sequence of keys you pressed to get there.

(I am currently that person, with vscode and emacs. I have better things to do than retrain myself out of a set of keybindings I've become very efficient with.)

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