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Comment by bitvoid | Hacker News Reader

This is the question from the survey:

> What is the primary operating system in which you work?

It doesn't ask anything about preference and I wager most people don't have a say in OS for their jobs. Same reason that Microsoft Teams is the most "popular" synchronous tool, yet so low in the "admired" section.

That's not to say you're wrong, just that the data you linked to does not "back it up".

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There’s a ton of other questions, such as about visual studio (on windows, where else), loved stacks (.Net leads a category…likely most of that is dev on windows). Look at C#, Azure, ASP.NET, ASP.NET Core, Teams over slack and all in that category, and on and on.

And calling teams low in the desired section is such an odd assessment. It’s 3rd out about 2 dozen, and you ignore other highly desired items like .Net being #1 in its category, visual studio 4th of about 2 dozen, and others.

So yes, the data backs up that a lot of devs are on windows and that a lot want to use tech that windows devs use. That you so misrepresent one category and ignore others is not a very good way to understand the evidence, which far outweighs any one persons opinion in this thread.

> And calling teams low in the desired section is such an odd assessment.

I said it ranks low in "admired" (i.e., those who use it and want to continue using it). Less than 50% of those using it want to continue using it despite it being the most "popular" by a significant percentage. If everyone had their choice, Teams would drop heavily in popularity.

Regardless, it was just an example of how "popularity" doesn't mean anything because most people don't have a choice in their day jobs.

The question isn’t wether they want to use windows but if they’re productive using it. Unless you want to claim that a large proportion of devs isn’t productive, having a proportion of devs use windows proves that it works.

It seemed like "productive" was used in a relative sense. Would all those people be more productive on macOS or Linux? That's not clear.

Also, I thought the parent was replying to the following part, considering they said "I know plenty".

> I don't know a single software developer that prefers windows anymore.

> It seemed like "productive" was used in a relative sense. Would all those people be more productive on macOS or Linux? That's not clear.

I would assume that companies are semi-rational actors and would switch if they could improve productivity that way. Especially since some sectors (graphic design for example) seem to prefer MacOS while others don’t. Of course there are some other factors (support, network effect, purchase cost) but if windows was just plainly unproductive, surely it wouldn’t be as popular as it is.

> Also, I thought the parent was replying to the following part, considering they said "I know plenty".

True, the survey doesn’t prove they actually prefer windows, u missed that context.

> I would assume that companies are semi-rational actors and would switch if they could improve productivity that way.

lol

Indeed, i have never worked for a single company bigger than about 10 people that I could call 'semi-rational' when it comes to maximizing their worker productivity vs costs.

I've seen them be semi-rational on making decisions that actively reduce employee productivity.

At the end of the day, I don't think employee productivity matters much to large corporations.

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