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Comment by ydnaclementine | Hacker News Reader

Naive question, today can you work at microsoft as use a mac for development on the job? (non windows specific development of course)

I think about how if you work at apple, you're probably strongly pushed to not use an android phone (I'm sure some exist). Compared to google, you could probably use either android or ios (even with google "owning" android), or mac, windows, or their own flavor of ubuntu for development. Windows is less than stellar for development generally (ignoring .net/c# things), I'd be grumpy using windows for development even if they offered a zillion dollars. WSL probably makes it okish, but is still new

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Yep - worked there for a few years on an iOS/Mac team. Was pretty fun to watch the progression over the years. When I joined they gave me a mac and a PC desktop because so many internal tools only worked on windows or IE.

But that changed rather quickly from 2016-2020. By the time I left I hadn't turned on that old desktop in months (unless I had to do some windows specific dev work) and could do nearly everything from the mac.

Sadly, I still have to support IE11. There are some people so entrenched that IE is the internet, that we've seen tickets come in through IT where people reported others for using Chrome because it isn't IE and they were concerned.

Sometimes I wish we could just tell these ignorant people get bent and figure it out. I'm not telling you to build goddamn Arch, it's just running a different piece of software. 100% of them didn't even ask to install it either.

IME device/os choice is usually more around IT security than weird cultish things. I.e. my current job, we only use iOS/mac because then IT only has to worry about keeping a fleet of iOS/macs patched and secured. Instead of Windows and a million different linux distros.

I also personally think they picked osx because devs using windows probably won't care (since windows is already not great for dev), mac people are happy, and linux people are just glad they're not using windows.

(I'm personally in the "linux person relieved to not be using windows" camp).

windows is already not great for dev? I'll bite, what were you doing, ios apps? lol

Getting a functional semi-ok, posix sorta vaguely compliant terminal is not a fun or easy task in windows. The web runs linux, and unfortunately, windows doesn't really want to do linux (WSL is a tiny concession)

WSL doesn't cut it, it's at best frustrating with all sort of weird problems. Just yesterday, as I was forced to use Windows at work, I couldn't get emacs to save a file because of some weird locking issue when trying to compile some react application that would work fine on linux

I don’t get it though. WSL2 has been perfect for me this far. I can’t think of something I need Linux for anymore.

Basically what the other comments said. I specifically work on data stuff so it's all python and java/scala on linux servers.

Yep. Currently working there as a dev on a team completely unrelated to Apple (i.e., i am not working on iOS apps or anything else that even remotely requires a macbook), using a company-issued macbook pro. And of course, you are always welcome to bring your own machine of any kind, as long as it allows you to do things you are doing for work (e.g., if you are working on something super-windows-specific that just straight up cannot be done on macOS, well, you better get a different machine or install windows on your macbook through Bootcamp).

Microsoft allows you to do corporate work and development on personal devices? That is incredibly surprising to me.

>Microsoft allows you to do corporate work and development on personal devices?

No, they do not. If you bring your own device, you have to put it under control of the company using MDM software, pretty much the same way it works with company devices. Without MDM, none of the corporate resources are accessible, just like they shouldn't be.

Generally speaking you can as long as the team's product and tooling are not Windows specific, so it varies by team, but there are significant parts of the company that do not care about Windows for your development environment.

Yeah, when I interned there my org used Thinkpad as the first-class laptop but still had an option for you to get a Mac. I also knew a couple people who just ran Arch, lol.

What we _had_ to use was Teams, though... better than Skype for Business, lol. But definitely not Slack.

I've heard accounts from some Google devs that Windows machines became quite scarce once Bing was caught scraping Google search. Not totally sure if that was true or not.

Windows machines at goog were banned in relation to entirely different event (hint: mostly to do with its dogshit security)

When I onboarded I got option to choose a Mac or thinkpad. IIRC a Mac is a recommended option for swe, but there’s nothing in the onboarding that says do not use windows machine

Yes, depending on the organization. Me and many others I know used OSX exclusively for development, but some orgs use Windows-only internal tooling (e.g. the Windows team.)

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