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Comment by spindritf | Hacker News Reader

Most businesses don't hire googlers and they will have a bad time if they implement Google's policies. It's not "cultural." There's quite a difference between someone who had been programming since they were 15 spending nights reinstalling linux and someone who "can use technology" where that means MSO and facebook.

How many people here serve as tech support for their families? And how many of your relatives are otherwise successful professionals?

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The tiny bit of tech support I did: people who had no clue were easy to support. The kids who had installed Linux and thus thought they were proficient enough to manage their machines were a problem.

This was 2001 and everythig was relaxed and pretty open. It wasn't hard to get the software you needed. But that one guy installed Kazaa - bamn, that machine got wiped and re-installed. Another guy brought in a game on 3.5" floppies to play on the pick and place machine - bamn, that machine got wiped by them trying to cover it up, leaving a gently tricky recovery procdure for me to recover all the unbacked up P&P program data.

People who don't know anything about computers might take a few extra clicks to get to what they need but they tend not to break things too badly.

Remember that more than half of Google are not Engineers.

The non-engineers don't get the linux desktops. They get mac laptops (or at least 98% of them do, some finance/business folks need excel/windows) and some hardware to dock it at their desks.

Excel runs on Mac OS, that's not a problem.

Excel for OSX is far behind Excel for Windows. Given that Excel 2008 didn't even have support for VBA, I daresay that Excel for Mac is neglected.

Sure

If you're "can use technology" (secretary) you get a completely locked down machine, preferably Linux or FreeBSD with a Web Browser and Google Office or OpenOffice (or whatever it's called now) and that's it.

Exactly. It works at Google because their engineers know their shit. Meanwhile, at your average corporation... That might not be the case, and you might spend loads of time trying to figure something out because your colleague uses some semi-random tool 'because hey it's cool!'.

"because your colleague uses some semi-random tool"

For extra fun combine that with not invented here syndrome and retired in place. "Git? whats git? never heard of it. Besides don't you know RCS is the industry standard for version control?" (which was actually pretty much true in 1985) And no this wasn't in '06 this was last year. I'm glad I don't work in that particular team!

And add some inter group politics for extra extra fun.

Not to hijack the thread but here's a fun story, the place I'm working at now actually considered 'version control', to be making a copy of the file before you started making changes. There was no version control. This is a software company that has been in business for ~20 years. I guess that's just part of what happens when you land these big contracts, and hire the least common denominator.

I think many HN readers would be amazed at how often this is still true.

I do not work at Google myself but I have friends and family who do work there. I don't think Google employees are immune from irrationally using random tools, but that's just my anecdotal observation.

There's a cause and effect loop here.

Windows is built to a large degree for median IT departments. They want to lock it down and give it to employees to use, but not manage.

Obviously this is anecdotal but, Mac users are usually more likely to go into system preferences and try to find out how to arrange their screens or add a printer. Windows users treat control panel as forbidden territory, which IT departments agree with. Installing and installing programs on Windows is more daunting than on OSX, Android, or iOS.

Basically, it's a UX problem. There is no real reason why a PC should not be manageable by a computer literate professional.

It isn't a UX problem, it's a political problem. It departments are responsible for, among other things securing their company's computing resources and ensuring their availability to support the business. The most expedient way, in their view, to accomplish this mission is to keep as much direct control over those resources as they can, even if it means the users are "inconvenienced". Add to this the human tendency to inflate the importance of your own problems and deflate the importance of other people's problems and you end up with a situation where everyone outside of IT runs crippled machines or thin clients and has to call on IT for every change or update of substance.

There is a happy medium, but IT (largely) is not interested in it. The current system meets their needs very well, but they have lost sight of the needs of their users.

I've done "corporate IT" for a 150 person company in the past. All "knowledge workers", all with a desktop, most over the age of 40-50 with varying degrees of tech savviness.

Support was a big deal for this group, and it becomes a lot a easier when every workstation is configured exactly the same way and has the exact same software.

I agree, it is much easier. The problem comes when "every workstation is configured exactly the same way and has the exact same software" hurts the productivity of certain parts of the organization because certain groups need a different configuration to do their jobs properly.

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