Hacker News Reader

Comment by isoprophlex | Hacker News Reader

I don't know your circumstances of course, but I'm anal enough about this that I'd consider that a deal breaker.

An employer that forces me to use an OS that treats me like the audience to a television soap opera (meaning, a dumb shmuck who can be puppeted around) is not worth it, it'll kill my joy in working real quick. Tried it, it was horror. So right now, I'd say I'd rather drink my own piss than use a windows box as my daily workstation.

View on HN

I’m a lawyer, not a dev. It’s a different world.

How are you verifying this in job interviews? Not using Windows is at the top of my list of wants in a new job, to me it'd be as good as a $10k raise. But I'm aware that asking about this during an interview sounds petty.

I get that, I felt petty too, but I'm much more productive, and much happier without windows. So you gotta frame it like that. "The cloud runs on linux, I'm most productive when developing natively on something close to where we deploy, can I not use windows?", or, "I have years of bash muscle memory and automate a great deal of mundane tasks, is it okay if I use linux?"

Or otherwise make it a gentle enquiry, "I see you provide laptops, can I get a linux/Mac machine to work on?"

Framing is key ;)

Edit: personally I outright asked "can I choose my own OS, I can't deal with windows, it makes my head hurt" or something like that. If you have the confidence just tell em how it is.

That's how I've been framing it too, something like "I do my best work on Linux/Mac". A couple places that have seemed otherwise fine have acted weird though, Tesla especially.

You've just exposed yourself as a free-thinker. Lots of corps consider that to be a gigantic red flag unfortunately.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com