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Comment by metalforever | Hacker News Reader

I’m a lead engineer and have been Staff plus for more than 5 years. I’ve actually personally run into this problem (not having a working laptop for an interview). I don’t really do laptops well because it’s not a good environment to get work done in. I can see a large screen(s) desktop setup better and prefer that.

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I used laptop because that's what the parent said, but I really meant a computer of any kind at home. I assumed a remote interview. If its an interview in person at an office I'd definitely expect hardware to be provided.

> I can see a large screen(s) desktop setup better and prefer that.

I kinda assumed that most developers took a similar approach to me. Laptop because portable when you need it, hooked to large screens, nice keyboard, nice mouse/whatever. I don't know what having a desktop would really buy me. I do 99% of my work with the laptop docked but that remaining 1% it sure is handy to grab it and go.

Desktop gives you a ton more oomph when you need it. Not that it is affordable today, but my personal desktop has 192GB of RAM, 24TB HDD, beefy GPU, and is basically never going to thermal throttle.

If you are just making web apps, it does not matter, but I do data processing where having the headroom can make a big difference.

I do have the cheapest used laptop I could find for those moments when I might require portability.

I priced one out for my current job and honestly the savings just weren’t there. The ram, gpu, HD now take up a disproportionate share of the price.

I’m keeping applecare on my macbook paid up and planning to hunker down for a few years hoping prices relax a little.

I always do the same thing: work for a new company, get offered a MacBook, ask to choose my own non-MacBook for the same price. When we part ways, I offer to buy it (at used laptop prices). Never had someone say no.

That’s a fair point. The most I use my laptop for is some local LLM processing. I’d have more headroom on a desktop, for sure, but 96GB M2 max has plenty of oomph for my needs. Maybe I’m underestimating how many power users there are. For my day job I tend to offload most of my work onto a big server anyway so I could probably get by with a Neo at this point.

Yes, that's me too and why I mentioned it. Often it feels like I'm alone in that many of my peer developers have sweet gaming rigs with beaucoup RAM while I'm just chugging along with a laptop.

In one instance for a data-oriented job interview I spun up a VM in the cloud because they linked a kaggle dataset for the at home test that was just a bit too big for my laptop to handle.

But to have nothing, no desktop, no laptop at all, is _odd_ for a developer. How did you get through school? If not school, then how is it a hobby-turned-profession without something to develop on?

The whole "no one should be denied access to a job" angle is weird too. What is the limit to accommodations?

American jobs more or less assume you have a car, given the lack of public transport. You could borrow a car but also borrow a laptop? Dunno, it's not a bad thought to reconsider some assumptions.

the mention of laptop was not adding a laptop requirement to the original question

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