No Microslop for me
(midwest.social)
Ek-Hou-Van-Braai
Programmer HumorDude how many qualifications do you have that you can turn down a job offer in this economy over such a rather 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.
Dude, that's like hiring a truck driver and telling him his lorry will be pulled by 4 horses.
If you've currently got a decent job, then you can afford to be suuuuper picky.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And preferring yet another proprietary OS.
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.
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.
I still use gmail as my spam catcher/throwaway account
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?
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.
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.
Yeah but MacOS has all the same security and group policy controls as windows.
Yeah but managing it fucking sucks.
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?
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.
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.
Good for you. It's great to have the financial certainty to refuse an offer that doesn't sit well with you. What's better is having the moral backbone of refusing something because it would bother you, even if it means l less financial reward.
I wish it were real.
As long the company is ok I'm ok.
I'm not planning to input personal info on the work provided laptop anyway.
Yeah. Work laptop strictly stays work. Even when I have to travel for work I use my own computer to log into my United Airlines and Hilton stuff.
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 work at a full MacBook shop and literally nobody uses xcode 🤷♂️ weird reason to be against it
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.
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
Mac is based on Linux now
Mac OS is my favorite Linux distro.
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.
Linux is a BSD fork now.
:)
Insane behaviour. Much as I hate Windows, for a "generous offer" I'd make it work.
if you had 2 or more options on the table, one that forces you to go to work in a Tuxedo and one that doesn't, would you still claim it's insane to turn down the Tuxedo offer?
You’d have to get two offers, accept one of them, start getting onboarded by the company you accepted, learn about the OS policy, without the second offer having expired. Maybe your experiences are different but based on mine that’s completely unrealistic.
Or maybe the second offer came in after having accepted the first one. That seems a lot more realistic, though extremely dependent on timing. But the most realistic scenario is, OP already had a job. But honestly if OP wasn’t just karma farming I’d expect them to have included the full story. So I’m pretty inclined to think this whole thing is bullshit.
I’d expect them to have included the full story.
- there is no reason for anyone to do that
- the "story", if true, does not necessarily have to come from the applicant
- it may very well be bullshit, but the hints you chose to focus on are absolutely irrelevant
If I'm being given the Tuxedo, I'm gonna make that look spiffy every day.
That said, Windows is in no way a Tuxedo.
Windows is more of a "your socks must be damp at all times while on the clock" policy.
Not exactly going to prevent you from getting your work done, but unpleasant, and you'll be miserable the whole time.
Yeah, but if I'm paid for my time that's only my time, being miserable requires extra payment.
Sorry for the potato resolution
I use WSL at work, I pin max RAM and only leave one CPU running for the host OS. It's still a nightmare. This upcoming week I'm finally deploying Redhat IDM so that myself and others can use their smartcards and the ancient AD infra to get linux workstations and jumpboxes. Microsoft did me a massive favor by raising our licensing pricing so now it's cheaper to replace Azure AD.
Should have used AI to up scale it
ducks
Lmao, I was going to reply seriously until I realized what com we are in. That’s some good bait.
On of the questions I ask when interviewing for a company is what kind of IT platform they work with. Windows is a big red flag.
Theyre going to really struggle if they ever wanted to make an iPhone app with that policy lol.
Do all your work in a VM on your OS of choice?
Devcontainers are awesome once you set them up properly, no need to run a VM.
They're not awesome when your workflow revolves around the command line and you're stuck choosing between wasting days trying to layer your configuration on top of the project devcontainer or giving up and using the unconfigured bash shell included.
What's awesome about them? I learned a bit of programming before containers were a thing but didn't keep up the skills, but I remember most of the concepts.
I mostly work in gamedev where they aren't that much feasible so I don't have much real experience working with them and I might be wrong but from when I looked into it a while back, it's basically just a docker container that you specify in a .devcontainer file (at least for VSCode, but other IDEs probably have something similar) and when you need to develop, compile or run your code, it runs it in the container. It also doesn't have to run locally on your machine, if you can run docker somewhere else (i.e on a more powerful shared server).
I can see several advantages (but I never really tested it in practice, so I'm mostly guessing) - containers are usually quick to start, you have the same and stable and replicable dev/build environment for all devs (since you just commit .devcontainers), so there aren't some hidden dependencies and "works on my machine" shouldn't happen too often. It also helps you keep your OS clean, so you don't end up with 5 versions of python, 3 JDKs and 20gb of random NPM packages installed in your OS after 5 years of development - which is the most important advantage for me.
The email is not very professional. Rejection of Windows is fine, but that if that's the kind of language the candidate uses at work, the company actually dodged a bullet.
What part of it is unprofessional? You specifically called out the language OP used - that seems totally professional to me. The overall message sounds like throwing a tantrum to my ears but that’s not what you called out. How do you think it should be worded?
I don't see an issue with it. There are maybe a few things I would say differently, but every IT job I've worked has had poorer language in the documentation, even sometimes the ones we distribute to customers.
I would want to assume onlinepersona was joking, but maybe not.
BTW, in this case, being non-professional is referring to OOP telling the truth about his feelings.
Fuck off. He has principals and stuck to them, good for him.
You are arguing he should be more polite to some corporation that he owes nothing to. Fuck corporations, they do not deserve our time and labor 99% of the time.
Eh, we don't owe politeness to our oppressors.
Your coworkers are not your oppressors. The people who own the company are. And maybe management if they’re assholes, but most people in management are just doing their jobs so they can get paid.
Fuck capitalist professionalism.
