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Comment by hollowturtle | Hacker News Reader

Remote IDEs managed by the employer? A deal breaker for me. IMO that opens the gates of micromanagement. I consider myself a fair productive and successful guy, in my development job, with gaps of non productivity here and there during the day and I consider them physiological. IMO again, Developers should stay away from centralized coding collaborative platforms, despite all astonishing tech accomplishments I see burnout right around the corner. Plus since I have an M1 development machines that's super performant, that I planned to use for at least 4 years, that's just like paying 1euro/day.

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On the other hand, if a company wants to micromanage its employees there isn't much that will stop them. It's possible to get the advantages of remote IDEs without the managerial snooping, you just need to work for a company that trusts its employees.

Not saying I prefer remote IDEs, just that they are more a symptom here and not the root cause.

Right - an employer who is willing to use cloud based IDEs for that is willing to install something like Teramind to just record your screen and webcam.

there are plenty of good reasons to use cloud ides. Biggest one being onboarding. New guy joins the team, we can spin up a ready to go system for them to hop in on and start browsing the codebase.

The last job I had I was thrown head first into things. Here's a guide on how to set up things. Use your ide of choice and you're off and running. You learn quite a bit on day one about the common flow you will be using immediately

Or you spend two days thrashing around because someone forgot to document a hidden dependency and nobody can remember what it is but everyone remembers that they hit it on their first day.

If the "new guy" can't set up their own development environment in a reasonable amount of time, I think you need a stricter interview process.

I need around two days to set up a machine with all the necessary components and settings for our development environment. I wouldn't mind not having to do this for myself or new people.

Woof, most places I've ever worked has a script that I curl and then I'm set up.

That said, I can't speak for the Mac users of the world. I've watched people make $30 an hour hunting down DMGs online...

I work in games, where it's unlikely that you'll have the prerequisites installed for even setting up the dev environment, and where CLI usage is not common. Visual Studio licenses require interactive logins to microsoft accounts, perforce isn't installed by default (and is configured by the GUI often times, requiring things to be set up before syncing) and then syncing the content can take hours - my current projects' workspace is 42GB, and my last project was >150GB.

There's many reasons a "new guy" might not be able to set up a dev environment in what you might call a reasonable amount of time.

- IT doesn't have the hardware ready

- New team member is inexperienced in using an IDE, but the entire development environment setup is GUI based

- New team member is inexperienced in a CLI, but entire dev environment setup is CLI based

- New team member is working from home and hasn't received hardware for new start date on their first day

- New team member is a fresh graduate, and needs actual mentoring and training

- Link rot/outdated documentation on setting up a dev environment.

- New person may not be technical (I work in games, we have artists)

- Working from a location where internet speeds to download a toolchain, OS updates, docker images are slow.

and then I'll just write a script to use GitHub Copilot to write a bunch of crap during my down times and when I get back I'll just make another commit that says, "Changed my mind, refactoring...wheeeee".

... why would they collect data at the IDE level when they have full access to the code repo?

You can just take a look at the pull requests and commits.

IMO The amount of data an employer can gather through a remote IDE is way much than pull requests and commits

But how is that data useful?

Dev A writes a lot of small commits and then re-orders them before pushing. Dev B has hours where his environment seems idle and then has a typing spree in between 9PM and 2AM. Dev C knows a lot more than A and B about the debugger.

I agree with you. I always turned down companies that do micromanagement and I was lucky enough to not get in touch with many during interviews. My point is my current employer trust me and I trust them. It took a while to build that trust however and I fear that, if remote IDEs becomes the norm, the abundance of data points would be abused and building trust for new hires could be more difficult.

What’s the difference between company-provided notebook and remote IDE in regard to micromanagement? Employer may provide you shiny new M1 MacBook with all necessary spyware. Even if you use your own machine, you should check every script in the project if it is not installing anything if you don’t trust your employer.

Actually, if you decide to use your own computer for work then remote IDE is probably better solution in terms of security and privacy of your own computer. You don’t have to worry that something nasty will be installed (be it malicious NPM package or spyware from employer).

> Remote IDEs managed by the employer? A deal breaker for me. IMO that opens the gates of micromanagement.

Fully agree, this direction sounds like nightmare fuel to me.

Seems like you think your employer should trust you but you don't trust them? Not every employer is a nightmare. If you think of it as a partnership (and you have the right employer), work is much more rewarding.

If only it works like that. Maybe you find yourself lucky with a manager that looks at your productivity stats with all warm and fuzzy feelings, but the manager above that sees only ROI, and in your review that productivity dip a 3 o'clock stands out. If you don't have this now, then YAGNI.

An employer is a soulless construct that exists for the purpose of extracting as much value from the world as possible in order to deliver it to shareholders. I hesitate to call it 'psychopathic' but it's not at all bound by human morals.

Trusting any given company is akin to trusting a snake not to bite you if your hand smells like a mouse. You might like to think there is some affection there, but you're simply anthropomorphizing something which is incapable of more than its nature.

Such a toxic attitude can go two ways.

Isn't then an employee a soulful being that exists for the purpose of extracting as much value from the employer as possible with the least amount of work delivered to only provide value to itself in a form of an end-of-month salary?

Employers and companies are built of people. Calling them a soulless construct and pretending everyone in the world is out there to get you is not a healthy attitude.

To ease on the toxicity, I think I would replace the grandparent's argument by this:

The employee is one person, which you can choose to trust or not.

The employer are multiple people. Of these, maybe dozens or hundreds can impact employee's work. You can trust all of them or not. This is the crucial difference.

I see it as realistic, not toxic. A single employee is a human that has greed as one of their drives. Not everything is about money. I'm quite certain I could earn more if I applied elsewhere, but my current company is a nice place to be.

On the other hand, a company is an entity almost singularly driven by the need to maximize profit for shareholders. I have seen multiple teams work months of crunch time, only to be cut loose shortly after they delivered for the sake of 'streamlining'. Now, did the management who did the firing agree with that course of action? Heck no! They were livid. Many walked. But the C suite decision makers found cost savings that would give them fat bonuses and decisions were made.

I often wonder why the same people who are so hesitant to trust government turn right around and blindly trust corporations. The snake is not evil. The snake is a snake. Calling this view toxic or unhealthy does not change the facts on the ground.

Employment becomes a partnership when you are rich and have in-demand skills, not when you have a personal epiphany about the nature of work.

IME employers can actually sense this when it happens and a lot of the ridiculous bullshit you would otherwise have to put up with melts away.

You ain't ever being a partner working on the checkout tills at walmart ;-)

I agree with this. However, I see it as inevitable. Big companies want to protect their their IP/source-code.

Remote IDEs will do absolutely nothing to accomplish increased protection, so that would just be a misdirection.

Remote IDEs will not prevent theft, of course. But they certainly can do things that make it more difficult than simply dragging and dropping a folder onto a flash drive.

They can especially help against somebody finding a laptop with code somewhere.

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