Employee claims she can't use Microsoft Windows for “Religious Reasons”
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That's just plain funny. People like this are why so many view HR as the enemy.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHR/comments/11fueld/ga_employee_...
This is reasonable in a way. I don't think the person who commented this originally understands why, but still...
Larger companies often use remote device management / monitoring. Not being a part of the system means you won't get the same enforcement on updates, firewall, internal ssl certificates, etc. It's not strictly bypassing, but it's potentially not complying either.
0. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/11/apple-introduces-appl...
A good company makes sure you can't bypass it.
On our platform if your computer is not managed you're not even getting on the network as it requires an automatically issued certificate for wifi and in most cases for the wired network too.
All the cloud services like MS365 we use will block you from logging in too. If you're managed but stuff is out of date you're rerouted to a mitigation subnet that just offers resources to fix it.
And we're not even a high security company like financial, military tech or healthcare.
We do support PC, Mac and Ubuntu and RedHat Linux though.
I'm a Stallmanite, but I don't claim religious reasons. I just can't work efficiently or effectively on Windows or MacOS.
I.e. I think they are made up situations for karma.
How does a qualified manager think this is at all okay?
There is also the related question about why the company needs this employee. What I've seen is that such red flags often come up in hiring. Good managers recognize that there is a potential culture fit and pass without losing any sleep. Bad managers, those who obsessed with increasing their headcount, are willing to ignore such signal. They're willing to sacrifice the quality of the team, its output, and the company at large for their own personal gain.
I could write a book about it over just what I've seen with my own eyes for 30 years. I wish someone would have forced me to see that, when this happens, it's almost always because someone is making a _conscious_ choice to do so, NOT because "they're stupid." It would have saved me an unbelievable amount of time and frustration, trying to "correct" their thinking from a place of naiveté and best intentions. My personality is such that I couldn't conceive that this path would have been chosen, as I thought it would be (in essence) "evil." Really, it's just another strategy for whatever "success" they can achieve, by people who don't have any of the other tools at their disposal. It's sad, but it's a fact of life and the nature of the human race. Once you can understand this, it's easier to recognize it, and just route around it. It took me 20 years to get it. I hope others fare better.
If they can, great, no problem, if they can't, they can be fired for failing to do the job, not for refusing to use the provided system.
The top comments and I share the same view.
Just use a stable distro, install the security updates and eat your spinach.
What "managing and tracking" needs to be done that the default package manager cannot do for you?
You can certainly configure these things but there are often audit requirements to prove it
From the policy side of things, you may run into "your laptop is not reporting that the latest windows or macos patches have been installed, you're required to have them installed".
It was way easier to accept the Windows laptop and just run Virtualbox all day long in full screen.
This sort of thing is not optional anymore and just dicking around with an unmanaged laptop and copying stuff onto unmanaged drives will be more and more difficult.
This stuff is not because of distrust or to make your life difficult. It's to protect the company and its customers.
What they should do though is support all business required OSes, not just Windows. Our company is pretty good at that and despite me doing all the work on managing non-windows compared to entire teams of Windows management people it works pretty well and users are happy :) Though I recently moved.
Not always about the amount of security software they have to deal with but these are just needed in this day and age.
I do understand your frustration though, as most enterprises don't care about developers if they're only a single-digit percentage of users, and have terrible IT processes like ITIL.
Also to make IT life easier. "You're getting updates when we say so, logs are getting shipped back and aggregated, every new binary started gets reported" approach saves so much time.
That's not an enterprisey thing to say. MacAfee, CarbonBlack, ViperSnot, etc all go for the low hanging fruit which is massive corps with 10K+ Windows seats. They won't support Linux ever and personally I get it. It's no big deal. You find ways to work around it.
2ndly, there is the nature of what the company does. If you are at a software engineering company, chances are you can just grab any linux lappy and get to work because everything you need is covered.
If you are at a software consuming company, you are at the mercy of what your LOB apps support. Software that has this kind of company as its customer either only targets windows or only targets web browsers (and even web apps somehow find a way to be windows-specific).
Given the sensitive nature of the topic, I wonder how deeply HR can actually question the request.
(This is a crazy story, I think OP is just trolling)
(remember how, when the new inmates came to a concentration camp, they were required to take a shower)