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Is primary OS a dealbreaker for you (when taking a new job)?

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Re: Is primary OS a dealbreaker for you (when taking a new job)?

#31

Post by hondo77 »

It became one a few jobs ago. Company kept saying they were working on being able to support Macs. Regime change and I straight up asked the new CTO about getting a MacBook on my desk. He blabbed something about needing to make a business case. Filling out my exit interview paperwork, I asked the CTO about the business case for losing a top developer because he wanted to be cheap about laptops (to be fair, there were also other reasons I left). About a week into the new job and my old team told me they were getting MacBooks if they wanted them. They thanked me for taking one for the team.

Be the change you want to see in the world, and all that.

Re: Is primary OS a dealbreaker for you (when taking a new job)?

#34

Post by aforwardslash »

Im a big fan of using the same os/arch for dev and production - this avoids a shit ton of subtle errors, specially on compiled languages.

Many companies seem to push mac laptops for dev, but their prod systems where your code will run, run on amd64; this actually tells a lot about a company, engineering-wise, if your job isnt developing with interpreted languages.

Re: Is primary OS a dealbreaker for you (when taking a new job)?

#36

Post by Barrin92 »

Doesn't matter at all to me honestly. From a developer standpoint most stuff runs everywhere. Dotnet is cross platform, virtualization/container tools, WSL, etc. The OS is almost abstracted away unless you're working on something that directly hooks into OS apis.

But for me for years the OS has not made a difference, just different UIs at this point. As for tooling, I've deliberately avoided anything that's not cross platform for that reason for many years. Obsidian is markdown based and works anywhere, so does Emacs. It's a big reason not to buy into the Apple ecosystem in my opinion because it exactly leads to the lock in you're struggling with.

Re: Is primary OS a dealbreaker for you (when taking a new job)?

#37

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

On the surface: not a dealbreaker. I can be flexible.

But once I start asking about the product and the dev workflow and start learning about why it's going to be difficult to deviate from the norm... those are questions that are likely to shine a light on practices that I'd rather avoid.

Re: Is primary OS a dealbreaker for you (when taking a new job)?

#38

Post by creer »

I used to charge a higher rate for working on "some" OSes (within a larger project with other more sensible OSes). I thought it was a decent tradeoff. I don't think that anymore. Life's too short. However when a consulting / contracting client needs it as part of the overall project, it's hard to say no. I understand and respect that they need the work. And yet life's too short. I'd still do it but I don't think simply charging more solves the dilemma.

I never got any push-back on OS-dependent pricing. More hours for the same result, AND more expensive per hour or day but sometimes someone just needs to do it.

Re: Is primary OS a dealbreaker for you (when taking a new job)?

#40

Post by aforwardslash »

afjeafaj848 wrote: post #6

No I care more about if the job involves solving interesting/novel problems Languages/OSs are just implementation details to me, I don't get why software engineers (especially junior ones) are so obsessed with them To me algorithms/systems in the abstract sense are the actual interesting part of the job

>Languages/OSs are just implementation details to me

But they aren't. Most languages have specific behaviours and performance hits in different systems, and sometimes undefined behaviour may be fine in one environment and catastrophic on another. Even interpreted languages suffer from this.

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