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If you're hiring, be forthcoming about the dev experience

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Re: If you're hiring, be forthcoming about the dev experience

#81

Post by C1sc0cat »

mattmanser wrote: post #64
C1sc0cat wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So run an xserver on your pc and work on the development server or your local Linux workstation. And why would you be running games on your companies Linux systems ?

Hehe, this feels like the typical oblivious hacker answer that begins "So do X complicated thing instead". People paid for simplicity. Engage your empathetic brain to understand why people don't want to make their lives complicated, instead of trying to invent another jury-rigged workaround. You can go dig through the HN archives around 2005 when everyone started switching to Macs. You will see the people delighted w…

UM having a native x access to your dev machines (which are full tech copies of live) is simpler - rather than this more modern method of every one developing locally on different hardware and a different os.

Re: If you're hiring, be forthcoming about the dev experience

#82

Post by globular-toast »

Karupan wrote: post #10
globular-toast wrote: post #2

I've been to companies that outright lie about their development environments. I only enjoy using GNU/Linux so one of my first questions is whether I can use Linux and if I would be forced to use Windows for certain things. One company told me yes for the first one, but when I got there I found Linux was completely unsupported by the draconian IT department. Many companies simply don't know the answer to the second b…

> One company told me yes for the first one, but when I got there I found Linux was completely unsupported by the draconian IT department Happened with me as well (but I use a macbook). I won’t call it draconian. The IT department usually has to deal with a large number of hardware/software support requests on a daily basis. It’s quite understandable that they won’t have all the answers for a platform they’ve never u…

I didn't say it was draconian for not supporting Linux, just that it was draconian. It was widely recognised in the part of the business I was in that the IT department was holding the company back when it came to technology.

And, in any case, I wasn't asking any questions about Linux, I just wanted to connect to the network. My current company lets me use whatever weird distro I want (even Arch, btw), but they won't officially support it. That's fine. I can, however, ask them to support standards that I need (rather than specific support for some distro).

Re: If you're hiring, be forthcoming about the dev experience

#83

Post by globular-toast »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #4
globular-toast wrote: post #2

I've been to companies that outright lie about their development environments. I only enjoy using GNU/Linux so one of my first questions is whether I can use Linux and if I would be forced to use Windows for certain things. One company told me yes for the first one, but when I got there I found Linux was completely unsupported by the draconian IT department. Many companies simply don't know the answer to the second b…

Standardizing a set of supported tools inside an organisation isn’t exactly a stupid corporate protocol, especially if it’s a very large organisation.

It is stupid. There's no room for growth if you standardise tools. What they should be doing is standardising protocols. There's a big difference.

Re: If you're hiring, be forthcoming about the dev experience

#84

Post by Arainach »

saagarjha wrote: post #16
Adisuki wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I had stopped using Windows for health reasons a long time ago. How does Windows cause health issues?

Maybe they can’t use it because of health issues that cause them to need special accessibility tools that are unavailable on the platform.

.....that ARE available on Linux? Accessibility is a mess on Linux.

Re: If you're hiring, be forthcoming about the dev experience

#85

Post by AmericanChopper »

xenonite wrote: post #77
AmericanChopper wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d probably just pick a better analogy. If the job can be done on the operating system provided, then it can be done equally well by anybody using that operating system. No need to grow bigger hands.

The analogy is perfect in my opinion. Like the body, everyone's brain is different.

If you’re working from the premise that your brain is only suited to work with one operating system, then you’re really only harming yourself, by shutting down any opportunities you may otherwise have open to you.

Small organisations have the luxury of letting people choose their tools more freely. As they grow, they tend to have to restrict this more. Not just because they might have to support the tools you choose to use, but because they absolutely will have to support how your choices work with all the other tools they have in the organisation. At scale, this starts to get out of hand pretty quickly, and the only way you can provide a good working experience is by adding constraints to the tools used.

On top of that, some organisations have regulations and compliance requirements to meet that make it even harder. If your basic procurement pipeline includes $10,000 of vendor due diligence, then you don’t want to just give everybody free reign to use anything they feel like. If those choices introduce additional ongoing compliance costs, then you want to control that even more so.

You could ignore all of that, and focus only on how it affects you. But there’s good reasons that organisations do that sort of thing.

Re: If you're hiring, be forthcoming about the dev experience

#86

Post by mattbillenstein »

The problem with this whole thing is that nobody really embraces the zen of devops (really the zen of everything) -- there should be one way to do things.

Prod is something that runs in the cloud, staging is something sorta like that, but the data is garbage and nobody maintains it, and dev is whatever someone could cobble together in a bash script to get something running using homebrew dependencies -- if you're lucky.

Or everyone hopes to docker-ify everything, but that's its own pile of garbage.

Re: If you're hiring, be forthcoming about the dev experience

#87

Post by dunefox »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #49
Jugurtha wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I had also become violent towards my machines, punching and kicking them several feet up.

This sounds like a mostly separate issue which you should get help for. Operating systems, by themselves, do not cause people to kick things.

They absolutely do. I could not develop on windows without anger management classes.

Re: If you're hiring, be forthcoming about the dev experience

#88

Post by FartyMcFarter »

dunefox wrote: post #87
FartyMcFarter wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like a mostly separate issue which you should get help for. Operating systems, by themselves, do not cause people to kick things.

They absolutely do. I could not develop on windows without anger management classes.

To be a bit clearer: I get that operating systems can be very annoying, but kicking things is not a healthy reaction to being annoyed.

If you kick things just because you're irritated, please seek professional help, and don't blame it all on Windows.

Re: If you're hiring, be forthcoming about the dev experience

#89

Post by _y5hn »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #39
closeparen wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mature IT departments tailor solutions to different classes of users with different needs. If they don’t do that for engineering, that tells you everything you need to know about engineering’s stature in the company.

To an extent, and as allowed by whatever particular constraints exist for that business. Letting you run whatever IDE you want, usually OK. Letting you install whatever operating system you want, well... there’s lots of reasons you may choose to not support that choice, that have nothing at all to do with maturity. If your jobs was improving developer experience, there’s only so many times you can come up with soluti…

This is more related to how organizations work. That larger organizations tend to need to streamline more in order to scale up number of employees, and do more to maintain acceptable security simply because there's that many more people on board.

If policy is install whatever you want, and if you get hacked, you're fired! This just won't stand in court. So policy is that IT department is responsible for installations, IT department gets the blame. Infrastructure is sort of "outsourced" within the company.

If you were accountable for those younger first-timers running I2P and Tor within security perimeter, what would you do?

Re: If you're hiring, be forthcoming about the dev experience

#90

Post by AmericanChopper »

_y5hn wrote: post #89
AmericanChopper wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To an extent, and as allowed by whatever particular constraints exist for that business. Letting you run whatever IDE you want, usually OK. Letting you install whatever operating system you want, well... there’s lots of reasons you may choose to not support that choice, that have nothing at all to do with maturity. If your jobs was improving developer experience, there’s only so many times you can come up with soluti…

This is more related to how organizations work. That larger organizations tend to need to streamline more in order to scale up number of employees, and do more to maintain acceptable security simply because there's that many more people on board. If policy is install whatever you want, and if you get hacked, you're fired! This just won't stand in court. So policy is that IT department is responsible for installations…

Lower down the tread I mentioned vendor due diligence, specifically because I’ve done so many vendor security reviews. But there’s more to it than that. You might also need to be threat modelling it, legal will need to review the ToS and privacy policy. You probably need to figure out the impact on other services too. If you’re in a regulated organisation, there could be any number of other things you have to do, and on going compliance costs. If you work in a bank, and somebody wants to install Gentoo, you’d have to figure out how to run anti-virus on it, how to centralise patches for it, how to install endpoint DLP, make sure it has the correct web proxy configuration... the costs can easily stack up.
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