There’s far better bourbon out there, seniors.
Replace the macbook with a beaten up Thinkpad with 4th-5th gen Intel CPU, then it’s more realistic.
Running arch
Yeah, who the hell associates macs with higher competence? Before the 00s, I associated mac users with stumbling on the worse option but not realizing it, after the 00s, wanting to follow trends and/or overpay for hardware to seem rich. They’ve always been form over function, and simplicity over power, which are things that novice uses look for, not more experienced ones.
Or maybe more experienced ones when most of those experiences went badly and little was learned.
A MacBook pro, if you’re into the apple ecosystem, is a solid option. You can run Linux and Windows in parallels and do your development on there, and for a lot of development workloads it’s sufficiently performant.
I like my system76 laptop, but I ran a MacBook pro for a couple years and it was solid, and this was over 10 years ago.
I think the point is not that it’s a MacBook, but that the senior is using a single laptop instead of a full multi-monitor setup.
Personally as a senior, I use 4 monitors. My eyes are too shit to stare at a tiny laptop screen all day, and I want slack/browser/terminal windows on their own screens. It’s much more comfortable as well.
Advertising, and Apple buying up some professional software to discontinue their non-Apple versions (as well as disabling customization as “they know better than the users”) made it equal with “professionalism”.
Im pretty sure its mostly battery life.
You can pry my T440 from my cold dead hands or, at the least, give me a bit of notice so I can fish out my X220. Or my X80. Or my other X220. Or my T420… I might have a problem.
Pfft JD is trash no self respecting senior would by such short whiskey
23:22? Nah mate, my work phone turns off the moment I step through the gate. If someone chose to wait until after 16:00, they can wait until next morning to be told to fuck off.
If I resort to using a Mac I want someone to put me out of my misery.
Honestly, between the MBP and a similarly priced Dell as a company laptop, i choose the MBP.
The battery is better, the screen is better, performance is better, etc
Dell doesn’t know how to make a laptop & windows sucks ass. Macos is so locked down by default that all the restrictions on a company laptop don’t change the user experience all that much.
In an ideal world, id love a debian thinkpad or framework. But we don’t live in an ideal world, so had to choose between the two worst possible options
At least you have an option. I’d take a Macbook Pro/Ultra w/e over my Dell laptop any day. I’d prefer Linux but no to that too. Our company is Dell laptops and Windows only. That’s it. I’m sure our MDM software could work on Mac/Linux but every time I’ve asked they’ve said no.
Brutal, i worked in b4 consulting before. They had Macs but you basically had to know someone to fight for it on your behalf.
I feel your pain, i struggled with a dell craptop for years. I swear to god, those things are designed to be awful.
(Although, shortly before i left i saw the new ones they were handing out which had Ryzen CPUs and actually looked pretty decent, but idk how well they worked because i left obv)
I was able to buy my M1 MBP from my company for cheap and the laptop is amazing. Its like 4 years old now but it doesnt feel like its aged a day. Easy 6 hour battery life while doing heavy tasks and it performs like a beast. It’s faster than my desktop at many tasks such as compilation.
M CPUs make me a believer in ARM and other non-x86 chips, but preferably RISC-V in the long term.
In an ideal world, id love a debian thinkpad or framework
Then make your world ideal. Pester your boss or the IT guys with articles showing how Linux is better than Windows at security or dev work. Show them how Linux isn’t prone to the same security concerns. Show them articles or examples about how you could do your work with a Linux install.
Maybe this works for a small-medium business, but for large enterprises (i work for a massive tech company) it doesn’t work like that.
Corporate devices are bought through enterprise service agreements, which have to go through the lawyers as well as the procurement team. Although you could get a contract from Lenovo for the actual devices, a Linux distro would have no service agreement, so that would kill it right there (+ legal would probably flag the risk of malicious code being injected into the OS, i.e. xz). Ignoring thag, devices that are onboarded need to be able to fit into existing device management solutions (ABM/MDM, EDR, DLP, AD, etc etc).
And before any of that, there would be some survey that goes out to determine how many employees would realistically make the switch. For Linux, that number would likely be so low that the business teams would decide it isn’t worth a discussion because of low business impact & user desire (not to mention that now the IT teams also need to be skilled up to support it).
I couldn’t even get a FOSS browser extension approved to be installed on my device, much less spur a movement for adding a whole new set of devices to the corporate inventory.
(Editing to add, i did talk to the IT guy and he said he wished he could give me one because he wants one too lol)
redhat provides enterprise support for Linux.
my very large tech company heavily uses Linux (and I personally have both a Linux laptop AND desktop).
it’s not the easy path, but when it happens it is so nice
a Linux distro would have no service agreement,
Ever heard of Red Hat?
You don’t know what you’re talking about.
As much as I would love to go over to a purely Linux system there just isn’t the support. I would not relish the prospect of trying to administer 5,000 laptops, and 300 desktops without the benefit of active directory user groups. Even with all of the messing about that Microsoft has done with Entra, it is still a far better mass device management platform than anything available on Linux and Apple haven’t even tried.
You don’t know what you’re talking about.
I guess you’re right, because I’ve never worked as an IT admin, or had the policy at multiple companies I’ve worked at changed to allow Linux devices for devs.
Well m-series macs are decent spec and reliability wise, but repairability is a shitshow. I’d buy one if I could afford it (but I suspect the keyboard is terrible). Edit: Linux in a few years is possible.
That’s why the company buys it! I wouldn’t buy one personally either (I had a personal M1 Air but Pro is too much for me). The keyboard got improved a lot in 2019 or so, it was the 2016-2018 one that sucked ass.
Mac user here.
Rght? "I want something shiny to write my code on because it makes me look cool and costs a lot " is not ether sign of seniority.
I can only imagine that you’ve never touched a mac much less used one for development.
I learned to hate the Mac forced upon me for the time I used it, thank you very much. Fuck everything about those boots from the fruit store. Especially in a multi-architecture team, fuck macs.
I did. The UI sucks.
What UI? Get a tiling window manager for all your terminal windows and then have your IDE or editor in one full screen workspace and the application being tested in another, browser for reading documentation and Lemmy in the 3rd one. You don’t even need to see the MacOS UI when working.
Like the other person said, “what ui”? Sounds like you didn’t even try it, like opening up GNOME and saying “this sucks” and then immediately turning the computer off.
I had two options at work.
Mac or Windows 11.
I was told the same at multiple jobs and just asked kindly that they spend the money on a linux compatible laptop. I had arguments to back my statement up too. It worked out.
YMMV
Good luck (if you want to go down this path and haven’t become a farmer yet).
oh I asked. this is a big company with 6-8k employees.
the answer was always, “no”.
looking for my plot, though I might just become a fur trapper instead of a farmer.
That explains it, yeah. Companies of that size often aren’t open for change unless it is top down.
Good luck with the fur trapping. Not sure if there’ll be less bugs though ;)
I cba to find it but there was a tweet of someone saying that buying devs M1 Pro MBPs pays off in half a year from the shrink in compilation times. Some guy got snarky in the replies implying it can’t be a very big project (in terms of the users and whatever) that OP’s team was working on and it turned out to be the Reddit Android app.
I mean… the official Reddit app was so bad that they had to charge for API access in order to get real market share.
It was already significantly more popular than the good apps by then. The API access thing was to improve numbers further for the IPO. But the app is definitely big enough to have compilation times that can be bothersome. Doesn’t mean it’s a good app of course.
Sure, if you compare it to a thinkpad for 1k. M1 Macbook pros cost how much when they were released? 2.5k? 3k? Of you’re going to get reduced compilation times. But what exactly is it “paying of”? How is the calculation from time to money done?
“I can store so much stuff in my RAM, it’ll pay back in 6 months”. Such a random metric.
A well specced Thinkpad is more like 2-3k. Calculation from time to money is done assuming a 40 hour work week and the average salary of a software engineer in that team. The comparison was to an Intel core i9 MBP IIRC. And the comparison wasn’t two laptops, it was replacing the year or 2 old ones for the new model, not accounting for resale value on the old ones even.
If I interpret the mac as just any laptop then I kind of agree. The more experience I have gained the less I care about how many monitors I have or how fancy my keyboard is. I do require linux though.
No the keyboard is important. There are so many truly awful keyboards out there that have no travel on the keys.
I absolutely cannot stand the keyboard on the MacBook air. It’s so incredibly cheap and it appears to be made out of the same material that they package luxury chocolates in.
Keyboard is critical to me. I can work on a MacBook keyboard short term but something like a Glove80 or at least an Ergodox is critical for me in the long term.
Also OS X Unix is nix enough for me.
I can lightly mess around with opensource projects on windows …with msys2.
Shun the nonbeliever!
I’m an alcoholic how do I translate this skill into becoming a dev? Serious question.
Holy shit there really is an XKCD for everything.
get hired as an entry level Q&A, drink with the devs when you break their shit.
they’ll accept you eventually.
Maybe not as a dev, but those qualifications make you perfect for tech support. The support people where I work have their own beer fridge plus dedicated lockable containers for their liquor and no one would ever dare mess with that. And if you’re good at support, there’s a high chance you’ll get promoted to the Product Owner role pretty fast!
The best, brightest, most complicated thing I’ve done in IT became obsolete in 4 years.
System admin. This is still relevant
That’s not true. I prefer wine and Scottish whisky
Or at least not Jack.
There’s two products of Jack Daniels that I do appreciate:
- their BBQ sauce (I know there are better ones but none of them reached the UK yet, sadly, it’s a “good enough” substitute at a good price)
- Gentleman Jack - pretty much the only commercial bourbon I find drinkable, albeit not worth the price
Gentelman jack is a very smooth whiskey. If thats your taste, japanese whiskeys also tend towards smooth.
Suntory is a good brand. I prefer their $60-ish Hibiki whiskey when im looking for something extra smooth, but all of them are pretty easy drinking.
I found most Japanese whiskey to be too sweet for my taste. GJ has that balance of smoothness while keeping the sweetness at bay.
Plus I’m not that big of a fan of non-scotch whisky anyway.
By the way if you want something truly smooth, and not too sweet, the cheaper Mackinlay’s Shackleton remake, usually around £20 a bottle (should be around $25-30 in the US), is an amazing choice.
I used to prefer Jameson poured into my coffee when I worked somewhere with 6 hours of zoom meetings a day. I don’t care what the laptop is,really, as long as it’s not running windows and it has a buttload of ram. It’s usually provided by whoever I’m working for anyway.
The constant distraction and availability resonate with me.
The main thing is to put in systems where you don’t need as much effort to handle daily business. Usually you can engineer your way out of high touch, multi-step process glue.
In my youth working manual labour jobs I was full of vinegar and wouldn’t wait for the trucking dolly. Older workers taught me to slow down and I took that advice into software work.
That’s exactly how I’d consider experience. You think via systems(which include human interactions) instead of only technical aspects.
I’ve seen teams in really bad shape because the senior engineers fail to provide the right kind of leadership.
I was a senior developer within my first year, so I guess this tracks with the mid-wit theory. Now I’m well beyond that level I answer all questions with “it depends”.
a senior engineer should has nothing to do with a fisher price toy, a glorified miniature lamborgini. real engineers should only use thinkpad.
I know right? What a poser!
/s
