Manager: Everyone will be required to switch to Mac in the next couple of months.

Dev: Um, why?

Manager: Macs are more professional and developer focused than windows machines, I read it in an article. Plus they look way nicer.

Dev: Half of the applications we use don’t have a version that works on iOS.

Manager: What? How do you know?

Dev: I have a Mac for occasionally doing some work on the iOS app we support. I ran into that when I was setting it up as a development environment.

Manager: You have a Mac?

Dev: Yes

Manager: Why? How come you don’t use it for development?

Dev: …

At least PHB read an article. Usually massive changes like that come because some sales pro waved her tits at the manager and scored a huge sale.

Lmao.. I read it in an article.

Boomer boss detected.

I asked my boss to get mac's for my team. Practically begged them.

"It's not in the budget"

However, the other half of the team that I don't manage got them.

Got a mark against me because the team "wasn't producing enough product". I explained to them that it was because we were working on 7 year old hardware and with a platform that actively worked against us. I had requested mac's for the rest of the team and was told it read out of budget.

Got told that it's my responsibility to ensure the team is productive regardless of hardware.

That's about the time I gave up, bought my own device and made myself so important to the success of the product that they will probably have to shut the doors when I leave.

Fuck em.

@Sariel

If I was that hamstrung now, I wouldn't hesitate to start applying elsewhere.

@sariel +1 for bringing your own hardware. I walk at the speed other people run because of this

@sariel I’ve actually taken to asking about hardware in interviews. Companies that either don’t know, don’t care, get annoyed or don’t understand why that’s important are a red flag for me. It’s like being a race car driver and the company not knowing what car they want me to drive ffs.

Dev: What are the specs of the hardware you develop on?

Interviewer: Um, we use Windows

Dev: …

I always think it's a dumb idea to have a hardware or OS limitation...

From a DevOps perspective it's best to have a "pristine" test bed for devs.

Lord knows what miracles I've seen devs doing on their machines - not in a positive way - rather in a "How? Why? Is this even possible?" way.

So if a specific OS is required, I think it's more cost efficient to have a test bed for it than to organize the hardware for everyone required.

Plus virtualization and other technologies made sharing a single baremetal machine quite easy - and fair (hardware limits / ...).

Paying for a beefy hardware monster virtualization server that can host 20 plus dev VMs is always better than having to support, maintain and pay for 20 separate dev machines.

For me, an OS enforcement would be reason to quit.

Classic, management thinking they know what's best for development. I don't understand why they pay so much for developers and then fail to listen to them. Like, "I know we're paying you $65 an hour and you're an expert in your field and I just started working here a few weeks ago, but I think I know best because if you take a look at my title it says MANAGER"

Your manager seems like he's under the influence of a power I've seen in anime.

"Jail House Lock causes its victims to be able to only remember three new pieces of information [...] and when they learn a fourth "thing", they will forget the first thing they've learned and so on."
JoJo reference irl

@bahua
I wouldn't say this is inaccurate. The dumpster fire like Adobe Experience Manager is still alive only thanks to Adobe's strong brand and sales tactics

@sariel when you worked to work with some bad excuse of a platform it’s a nightmare

I do use my MacBook for professional stuff 100% of the time, but saying that “Macs are for professional work only” is a gross generalization that will kick you in the balls when you realize how… *untrue* it is. Macs are computers that can do whatever you want them to do. It’s not a cold business machine and that’s it…

@Ubbe

There's some really outstanding software, like paw, Alfred, witch, and iterm(though I prefer alacritty), and people don't often talk about them, but they-- especially paw --are alone, fantastic reasons to use it. It's not my daily driver OS-- even on an M1 chip it simply cannot come close to the performance I get on my Linux desktop and Linux laptop, both running AMD hardware --but it does work very well. I would recommend it as a development platform over Windows without even the slightest hesitation.

This sounds so much like the one article i saw that was talking like how oscilloscopes are the hottest new shit in electrical engineering...

@Ubbe Gnu/Linux ftw hands down