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Comment by krawat3 | Hacker News Reader

There’s so many reasons. First off, I cannot just download and install arbitrary software on my work machine. It would also never get approved due to governance and compliance reasons, data protection and the fact that I would be using a personal license for work projects. I believe this would violate not only my employment contract but also Claude ToS.

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It's so odd. Never before have I seen an example where small companies have such an insane benefit over large ones. (because of the insane rates large orgs need to pay for AI).

Small companies have tons of benefits over large ones.

A company I previously worked at was in the low 1000s of employees, but because finance would require us to pay by invoice, we often had to opt for enterprise plans. Typically the cheaper "Team" plans only allow payment by card. Enterprise tiers are almost entirely corporate "must haves" like SSO, centralised team management, etc.

As you scale from a bunch of people who know each other to multiple teams and then teams who don't even know who the other teams are, you are required to have bureaucracy. You go from being able to announce on a teams chat not to use AI for "super top secret project" to month long projects on how to segregate work so that some users can have access, but others can't. Vendors will capitalise on that and force you to pay for it.

I could never work somewhere that my work machine was locked down like that. I guess it's good I won't have to worry about ever being employed again, soon lol

> "I could never work somewhere that my work machine was locked down like that."

I heard Binance is hiring.

I don't know where you could work that this policy isn't at least nominally in force, outside very small companies. Common certifications like ISO:27001 and SOC2 basically require systems to be running only "authorized" software. It usually isn't actively enforced on developers, but IME virtually all companies have it as an official policy alongside a rarely used process to get approval for unauthorized applications.

I worked at a few companies that started off small and we had a lot of freedom initially, but as the company grew, things got more and more restricted. I got used to it. That sucks for a developer, but makes a lot of sense for the company due to things like data protection and streamlining processes. It’s much easier to manage thousands of workstations when they are standardized.

For instance, at my current workplace, 6 years ago I just got a MacBook with admin rights and that was it. Then, as regulations such as DORA started to take effect, I lost my admin account. Then this year we were acquired by a large org and now I am doing coding inside a VM. A few years ago I would complain, but in this market I won’t.

Also we have to admit that the cybersecurity situation is even more insane than it was previously. If I worked in IT and was responsible for lots of corporate computers I'd be locking things down as hard as the engineering team could tolerate, so I get it, even though I also am in fetters here with days of delay to get admin permission for installing something.

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