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Comment by kuahyeow | Hacker News Reader

All of our systems (development, live, etc.) run Linux with a relatively complex configuration

Depends on said complexity.

You listed three notes above. (A) is odd. For (B), similar packages should be obtainable unless it's a proprietary package for your startup. (C) Encryption is pretty well supported on OS X and Linux. Scratch Windows.

I'm sure some devs would welcome a new laptop. However, being restricted to just that without good reason will strike most as odd. Trust your devs to be able to setup their own dev environment. Allow other environments if they can make it work.

At the end of the day, it seems like the underlying message is what counts. Does it appear that you are encouraging or dictating ?

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Thanks for the info.

On the points: A: This may be less necessary than I believe admittedly. I've only worked at companies with 100+ people before, all who gave similar hardware. The advantages were in the ability to swap computers. If your computer dies, you get a spare immediately (you can even swap the HD!) as repairs occur. If someone leaves, the computer can be given to the next hire (or an intern). B: Our dependencies are all open source. The full system though (needed for testing) uses kernel modules which don't have a (fully working) mac port. C: That's good to know. (hopefully easy on OS X -- no one currently in the company uses it).

Finally, again in the companies I worked, it was pretty much expected that company development stayed on company equipment, mostly for security issues. Is it pretty common in companies with < 20 people for devs to bring their own machines?

I see where you are getting at.

With A: Standardization is good but it probably takes at most a day to setup a new computer. It takes weeks to learn and master a new environment though. Productivity is probably paramount in a small company more than standardization.

B: Ah, but if your dev could get it working on a mac, would it be ok? If not why? How about BSD, or some other linux distro different from your intended setup?

C: As someone else mentioned elsewhere, enforcing restrictions is easier said than done. The key question to a dev is why? In some ways that just discourages devs away from working on the project as much as they like.

The key point here is that in a small <20 company, you want to attract the best talent that's out there. Someone who's at the top of their game. Most likely they will have their own machine with their own setup. A % of them will likely stick to their own setup instead of using two computers.

You may employ contractors too. That makes it even more likely they prefer their own machine.

Being offered a choice, i.e. You can use your own computer, and here are some things you need to do too (encryption, etc) or here's a brand new one all setup is infinitely better than You must use this only

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