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Comment by stuff4ben | Hacker News Reader

Not much more information than the Joel Test. I disagree with the statement about hardware, "bonus points for Macs". As a daily Mac user and Java/RoR developer I am just as productive on my Ubuntu box as I am on my Mac. Having a Mac is nice, but not something I would choose a job over. IMHO, bonus points should only be awarded for something rare, like a tech gadget allowance.

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Bonus points because it means that they will let you work on the platform of your choice regardless of the hardware being more expensive. Starting my current job I was very happy when they asked me if I preferred Mac or PC.

Having Macs doesn't mean you get to use the platform of your choice. Is everyone using Macs, or just the people who want them?

What about the people whose platform preferences aren't so trite as "Mac or PC"?

Perhaps having Mac is more a sign that a company is willing to shell out for decent tools moreso than Macs being some super development platfrm. A developer area full of high-end macs tells me that a company is willing to pay good money for developer tools in a way that a room full of generic Ubuntu boxes does not (independent of their respective merits).

While I agree for the most part, I'm also leery of companies showing developers a room full of Macs just to get "bonus points". I fear Macs are becoming the new Aeron chair. Given most startups are poor, I'd much rather a company spend it's money wisely. If it means I have to do development on a high-end, but generic, Ubuntu box, then so be it.

I don't know much about PCs, but you can buy off the shelf a Mac with 16G RAM and 1T of disk, that's enough for a developer to run a dozen or more VMs... You can to all intents and purposes put a replica of the production environment on every developer's and tester's desktop. That's got to be a big win for productivity.

That one mac supercomputer can finance about 4-5 high end developer beige boxes running ubuntu.

And you'd need those 4-5 boxes in a stack under your desk to run an equivalent environment.

I'm confident that a cheaper 1T disk 16gig of RAM Linux machine can just run just as many virtualized instances as a 1T disk 16gig RAM Apple machine. So if you had 4-5 Linux machines, that's 4 or 5 additional copies of this mythical production environment. Using your own math, this would be an ever bigger win for productivity.

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