Hacker News Reader

Comment by dward | Hacker News Reader

This is not common practice. Google has had a strict no iCloud, no Dropbox policy for a while. We can't even have code from the core codebase stored locally on our company issued laptops.

View on HN

That's more of what I would expect!

Does that make it feel more like he was intentionally storing company files in a personal account?

In my opinion, yes.

Is everything done on networked drives then?

Builds are run on servers, using Blaze: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9257000

What about editing? Do you mount a network drive to edit files on your computer?

Roughly that, although it uses a Google-developed internal tool. Source code files can be transferred to one's workstation (which lives in a Google building), but not to one's laptop—all work on a laptop must be done through a remote session, either SSH, VNC, or via a (again Google-internal/proprietary) cloud-based editor.

Google uses FUSE extensively. Basically there are a bunch of daemons that make the various cloud source repositories look like a local disk.

But even those aren't allowed to be mounted to your corp laptop. Those clients can only be mounted on a workstation unless you are doing iOS development.

There's also several options for purely online editing (devving on a Chromebook isn't bad)

SWEs are issued a desktop machine, and a laptop. The laptop (Mac, Linux or Windows; employee's choice) is essentially a very expensive remote desktop client. All development work (except some OSS stuff) is performed on the desktop machine.

(Or that's how it was when I worked there until 2016.)

Are Chromebook Pixels a common SWE laptop then? That seems like almost the exact case that they're designed for

Yes chromebooks are very common developer laptops, up there in numbers with (still most popular) macbooks and linux laptops. They are more than sufficient for the lion's share of engineering roles. Corp engineering is pushing them hard because they are cheap and secure.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com