Why would you not be very clear about this right at the start of the interview process so you’re not wasting everybody’s (including your own) time? If this is one of your absolute show-stoppers, then say so up front and we can either work with IT to get you what you want, or decline and move on to the next candidate.
Mac?
Mac has a Unix-like command line, but is otherwise shitty to use.
I dev every workday on Windows 11 and I don’t get why people feel like it’s awful to work on? I dunno what everyone else is doing but it’s basically just switching between the IDE, Slack and the browser. The OS never seems to be an issue for me. My only real gripe is that even I click update and shutdown at the end of the day, it updates and restarts.
Same for my colleagues using a Mac.
I’d be more bothered about using Teams over Slack
Windows can add some complications as a dev, especially in the corporate environment when really strict group policies are implemented that stop Devs from installing or configuring systems as they need.
One company I worked at remained on Windows LTSC for security reasons, and a lot of Devs that were working with Java hit a snag if for whatever reason an IDE they were using really wanted a system environment variable configured a certain way and it would straight up ignore user environment variables. They would be restricted from basically being able to configure anything without getting IT to remote on and make the changes for them.
I was forced to use a Mac for the first time years ago for work, I still hate working on a Mac but I can’t deny how much more flexible it can be compared to working in a Windows environment that is locked down.
why tf would you apply there
Dude how many qualifications do you have that you can turn down a job offer in this economy over such a rather minor inconvenience?!
Dude, that’s like hiring a truck driver and telling him his lorry will be pulled by 4 horses.
If they want to pay me to deliver stuff on a unicycle, I’ll be delivering stuff on a unicycle. Do I want to ride a unicycle? Depends on the pay.
Yet I work for a very successfully (we have too much work and don’t even advertise for it) small company and we all use windows computers as software engineers. We use C# .Net Entity Framework, SQL, GraphQL, React Typescript or WinForms.
We have some large clients that most people ok earth have heard of.
Have you considered that you might have too much work simply because these tools are inefficient?
Eh C# GUI development is quite productive. I don’t think you’d get such a pleasant experience on Linux.
Nobody thinks you can’t do software engineering on windows. It’s just worse.
That isn’t minor at all. If I’m using a tool all day, it needs to be something that I’m comfortable using. Forcing me to use Windows is like taking my office chair and replacing it with a chair that has a lumpy cushion and broken casters.
I understand putting up with a shitty job situation because you need the money, but this is certainly not a “minor inconvenience”.
“Minor” inconvenience is not having a coffee machine in the dining room, it’s nothing like the culture of incompetence that permeates organization that are that severely vendor-locked.
Exactly, it’s a serious red flag.
I can say also as a senior engineer, I would never turn down another o ly because of this. It’s not my software I’m making, it’s the company. It’s not my things. If they want me to code on a pentium 3 I’ll happily do it, it’s their money. They want me to waste it on that, that’s on them.
If you’ve currently got a decent job, then you can afford to be suuuuper picky.
The best time to find a job is when you have a job.
post the response after too - if they do
Device management on Linux is next to impossible compared to windows or macs
What makes you think that?
I had to do that once but the company wanted me to use a Mac over my own Linux. I can’t stand anymore to be forced to use specific platforms to do my job. It’s like going to a car repair and demand the mechanic to change your tire using a plastic wrench.
I mean, it could make a difference if you had to use OS specyfic tools, but if you’re going to just code, use whatever you want.
I think that’s a tad excessive. Sure, Windows sucks, but it’s not my machine so I don’t give a shit. Now, if they expected me to bring my own machine and also insist that it’s Windows, I’ll get pissed off and refuse the offer. Their machine though? They can demand whatever they want, so long as I can actually do my job.
9/10 times it’s not Windows I’m fighting against when I’m unable to do my job, it’s the IT department not giving me admin rights over the right folders so I can’t even install Docker without spending 3 days with them to get the right permissions.
Fully agree. The company also has stuff they have to deal with like compliance, fleet management, device trust etc that I admit is easier to comply with if you just say fuck it windows it is.
As long as I get local admin and WSL. If not I’d probably quit too
If they trust me to manage company and other companies server infra but not to manage my fucking laptop, they can get fucked.
Windows 11 has been a nightmare for me. Every time I leave the file browser open my fans start up like I’m doing something insensive. Mssms freezes constantly, visual studio freezes constantly. Switching between virtual desktops? Not without waiting 30 seconds. And finally, idk if this is a dell thing or a win11 thing but the “low power mode” that activates if my battery is at or below 10 percent, despite me turning off all battery saving settings I can find, makes my computer functionally useless. Programs don’t load, I can’t close or open anything. Like the whole point of low power mode is so you have a little more time to wrap up things before you can get to a charger. There’s no point to that if you set my PC so low power that it literally can’t even run the bloated ass OS on it. I hate it so fucking much.
Personally I also would not quit/back out just from that, but “it’s not my machine” misses the point, IMO. It’s a device I’m expected to use ~40 hours a week. Windows fucking sucks. Using that trash for half of my waking hours sucks. Been there, done that, I hope to hell I never have to again.
You’re being paid to use the trash though
The fuck are you doing in it?
I’m a software engineer and we use windows. 90% of my day is spent in Visual Studio Professional. The rest is split between chrome, outlook, teams, postman, and SQL server management studio.
I literally never go to the start menu. I have shortcut icons on the bar for everything I need.
In my experience with windows there’s just a slight lagginess everywhere. I’ve had full gaming PCs still feel laggy just in Vscode. It’s not bad but it’s a small pain point that I don’t want to experience for 40 hours a week.
Windows isn’t fit for software development unless you’re doing Windows specific stuff. Maybe you can get by with WSL or cygwyn or similar, but that’s just a bandaid to make the machine less windows. You’ll probably still have problems with like case folding and line endings.
As someone who does dev stuff on both windows and Linux, line endings have never been an issue. Are you using notepad or something?
I’ve only had to use wsl for some stuff only designed for *nix, like openresty (and lua in general).
I think that depends a lot on what you’re expected to do. I’d write an email like this if I were expected to be an effective developer on a Windows system. I use Linux because I use vim, not the other way around. I can’t WSL for linux to use tmux or something and be nailed to one laptop screen, it just isn’t worth it. Besides the whacky clipboard problems, it’s just not sustainable to be permanently containerized in your host system IMO.
Now if you are using an "I"DE like vscode or something it’s maybe not so bad because it at least plays on windows. Gvim is trash, and the whole reason to really lean in to vim/nvim is to sew your development environment right to any other program you need.
IDK, there’s a dollar value beyond which I would not care, but it’s a gross amount.
I have to use Windows 11 on my work laptop. So I just put it in its own DMZ and don’t worry too much about it.
Yeah I care about my machine as much as it has my stuff inside, if it is not mine…
Does anyone actually believe this post??? Because it reads like upvote farming.
We had a new joiner quit on his first day because of this. Didn’t even get to eat the burrito he ordered :( So it definitely happens.
Not IT, but my dad said they lost a chemical engineering hire over this once, like 25 years ago.
Its posted in a humor sub soooo no
Not really. My employer provides win11 too, but I do over 60% of my job on debian machines running in hyper-v. (the other 40% are administrative tasks and work restricted environments)
To be fair they tried posting it on the Linux community on .ml and there were so many upvotes and positive feedback that it crashed the server. So they had to post it again somewhere more balanced to limit the impact.
They say while using gmail.
It’s tagged “Inbox”, it looks like this is the recruiter’s POV.
Gmail is functional at what it sets out to do, which is send and receive email.
The sender is not expressing privacy concerns, they’re expressing functionality / utility concerns.
Fair enough, still seems silly as hell to me. Windows is perfectly functional for corporate, and even software development use as long as the team managing the image and standard settings at your workplace is competent.
Yeah, being able to customize everything to meet your preferred workflow etc with Linux is preferable.
Gmail is functional at what it sets out to do
it is not. it can’t even do such simple thing as sorting the inbox by the sender’s name. it may seem functional to people who never used real mail client and were brainwashed into accepting this as the only available ui, but it is really not.
And preferring yet another proprietary OS.
I still use gmail as my spam catcher/throwaway account
Odd to use it as part of job hunting though, which is the context in this image.
I use it at my “catch other people’s emails” account, tho so far I haven’t been quick enough on the draw to do cool stuff like slurping account creation tokens, goodie delivieries or stuff like that.
Better than outlook, no?
Sure, but kind of silly for someone who would take a stand against MS to the point of refusing a job to be happy with Google.
Then again, they also expressed they’d be happy with Apple/Mac
99% companies have been using Windows for the past 30 years. I would gladly accept any job using Windows, even more if they paid well. I hate Windows way more than everyone else, but being unemployed is worse nowadays.
You assume they don’t already have a job and we’re just looking for other opportunities. Not everyone is unemployed before they apply for other jobs. If anything that is a good time to look as it gives you stronger position to negotiate from.
Senior backend engineering definitely doesn’t see 99% windows adoption rate.
Yeah but a senior engineer would just use an old personal linux laptop from home, they wouldn’t even bother bitching about the employer issued machine.
How are they going to use a personal device when corporate policy locks that down?
They don’t use a personal laptop, and I’ve never heard of such thing for any company that has more than 10 employees. The security risk is huge
I haven’t found a company that enforces windows of everyone. Seems ridiculous. I would sign the contract then simply require a Mac because I don’t know how to use Windows. IT be dammed.
I recently quit a company that does. They hid that until after I accepted and started. I quit out of frustration after a couple weeks of having to listen the the fan all day due to their surveillance and telemetry running. They even disabled sleep mode, so you either had to leave that thing phoning home 24/7, or forcibly shut down every day. 10 minute boot time on a brand new laptop.
Smaller companies, maybe. But bigger companies will have a ‘Security and Compliance’ department which will force everyone to use a company-supported platform. It goes beyond OS too. Unapproved apps, even if you are allowed to install them, may not connect to company resources.
Managing centralized security and device management correctly on multiple OSes must be a nightmare. From EDRs to app and device provisioning.
You should do dev work in devcontainers anyway.
Not that it’s an excuse or that I’m happy with that, but I can totally understand why companies do that, and tbh I’d rather see a properly secured than have the option to run Linux.
But I’m biased, because I used to do Red Teamings, and the things I’ve seen…
You should do dev work in devcontainers anyway.
Devcontainers work for Visual Studio Code when developers are more than happy to click their way through running builds and debugging problems. But, as someone whose workflow is optimized for the command-line, they can fuck off.
for a senior engineer position though? That seems counterproductive. I would expect it of one of the entry levels or non-it but forcing a windows ecosystem on a development or engineering sector screams red flag to me.
A senior engineer obviously needs (and knows how to handle) considerably more access to their workstation and company IT infrastructure than the average employee. On the other hand, I’ve occasionally read complaints from IT security types about engineers being way to eager too install sketchy stuff.
There’s some truth to those complaints. I might need to try out several libraries and tools to see what works best for a certain use case. Is that new one with 15 stars on Github actually safe? Are all of its dependencies? How many developers perform a task like that in a sandbox? How many of those perform a thorough audit before taking it out of the sandbox?
Yeah but MacOS has all the same security and group policy controls as windows.
Yeah but managing it fucking sucks.
extremely based, I have no idea how any dev at my company tolerates windows.
in addition to how extremely slow and incapable the OS is in general,we have to submit tickets to run software because everything is installed through random .exes.
Lmao.
,we have to submit tickets to run software because everything is installed through random .exes.
You have to do that because your IT department doesn’t trust you. There’s no difference in danger between a dev with system access installing an exe or a DMG.
You have to do that because your IT department doesn’t trust you.
Nor should they.
Install Linux subsystem for Windows and you’re golden.
Hahahahaha! No. WSL is in no way a good substitute for a real Linux system. It’s better than nothing, but that’s about it.
The guy doesn’t want Windows but is ok with Mac. That’s… not how it works. At all.
but unpleasant, and you’ll be miserable the whole time.
on the one hand, mac is often virtue signaling for hipsters, on the other hand it is a unix system, so… it often works that way.
I think you’d find that many devs would opt for a Mac over Windows.
Hate both, but I’d run Windows over Mac any day (and I develop in both regularly since I have projects that require Windows and Mac, and will for a long time). But some of this is probably due to having to use the steaming pile of crap that is Xcode.
I don’t know anyone who uses xcode for anything but ios dev
That’s only thing I use the Mac for. Everything else is in Linux or a Windows VM (for Windows desktop apps that can’t be done outside of Visual Studio).
I work at a full MacBook shop and literally nobody uses xcode 🤷♂️ weird reason to be against it
It’s really the only viable option for iOS apps.
To be fair, I pretty much hate everything about the Mac, but Xcode is about the only thing I use it for, and it just gets worse with every release.
Then why use Xcode? Mac is essentially BSD under the hood so basically any Linux CLI tool works fine, and GUI applications work reasonably well with XQuartz or whatever it’s called these days.
There’s really no other reasonable way to build iOS apps. AppCode was a thing, but was retired a few years ago.
Why would you be forced to use Xcode? I’ve been a developer (just not Swift) for years and have never used Xcode.
Swift.
There really aren’t any other valid options for building native iOS apps.
Luckily, we don’t really do much native iOS dev anymore, so I’m just maintaining 3 apps, and not building anything new.
I only have to fire up the Mac for a few days every few months.
Mac is the compromise option
It’s a compromise if I’m not paying for it.
Still I hate that the basic, like copy, search… Use a different key. I can rebind them, but it’s at each keyboard config and makes it annoying when trying to learn new ones
Explain why.
Both are big tech, donate to fascists, closed source, and a cancer to this society, the tech world, and open source.
Most developers I’ve seen in the field don’t care about any of that. They care if the OS is stable and they can run their programs.
I’m not saying they shouldn’t care more, they absolutely should, but they don’t
I care if an OS can manage the running applications and their windows in a reasonable way, which MacOS cannot.
There are also enough people in tech who don’t know about Open Source.
The percentage increases as you go away from the software domain
Yeah, but only one of them uses UNIX
Feathers are beautiful, but they can be devices of torture too
Mac is based on Linux now
If by “Linux” you mean “Unix/BSD” and by “now” you mean “for the last quarter century”, then yes. So, no.
There’s a big difference between UNIX and Linux, and BSD can be very different from even other UNIX distributions. I believe macOS’ userland (definitely not the kernel) is based on FreeBSD 4.2.
The Darwin kernel is based on BSD… sort of. It’s a monstrosity hybridization of an ancient version of BSD and the Mach kernel.
Mac OS is my favorite Linux distro.
Linux is a BSD fork now.
:)
It shouldn’t have to be a privilege to be able to turn down a job because of poor decisions management makes, but you can really only get away with this if you have options.
