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Comment by mepiethree | Hacker News Reader

We lost several weeks for about 10 new devs at my company who started in May/June because Apple only sells M1 now, so that’s what the new devs got, but all the old devs have x86. Poetry+geospatial libs+other stuff didn’t work at all and the new devs struggled to fix it because while they may have had 5, 10, 20 years of software experience, they didn’t know all our stack and didn’t know M1. The remote environment made debugging very slow.

In retrospect we probably should have forced all devs to switch to M1 at once and upgraded everyone’s laptop, but we saw all these posts about how everything works on M1 and that just wasn’t the case at all in our experience.

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It sounds like you ought to be gotten at least one experienced team member an M1 laptop, and asked them to spend a 2-3 days making sure that you software runs smoothly on it.

Our software at work didn't work out of the box on M1, but fixing it was fairly trivial and mostly involved upgrading library versions (although we use Node not Python which admittedly tends to be better at portability). But someone completely new to the codebase definitely isn't the person to be fixing these issues.

I mean, there is certainly a class of issue that can be fixed on ARM, you're not incorrect there. Rosetta is not a panacea though, and ARM will not be there to save you when you're trying to spin up a half dozen Docker containers to run your testing framework locally. There are genuinely some issues on M1 that are too big to bikeshed, most of which unfortunately come down to software compatibility and instability. For a lot of companies, you either get an x86 workstation or you don't do local dev. That's unfortunately the status-quo when dealing with traditional, legacy codebases, and it kinda puts the Macbook Pro on the same level of usability as an iPad or Raspberry Pi. Still cool and situationally useful, but if I'm just going to SSH into $OTHER_MACHINE for all of my work, I may as well just get a different laptop.

Totally, as I said in my comment, I would have done that in retrospect. The trouble was that we didn’t see that as a risk, since everyone was telling us that there wouldn’t be any issues

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