[globular-toast]

I've been to companies that outright lie about their development environments. I only enjoy using GNU/Linux so one of my first questions is whether I can use Linux and if I would be forced to use Windows for certain things. One company told me yes for the first one, but when I got there I found Linux was completely unsupported by the draconian IT department. Many companies simply don't know the answer to the second but it usually turns out they use Exchange or email some important document in a doc file that only Word will display properly. These details are often forgotten, especially by some people who don't seem to mind following stupid corporate protocols.

[AmericanChopper]

Standardizing a set of supported tools inside an organisation isn’t exactly a stupid corporate protocol, especially if it’s a very large organisation.

[closeparen]

Mature IT departments tailor solutions to different classes of users with different needs. If they don’t do that for engineering, that tells you everything you need to know about engineering’s stature in the company.

[AmericanChopper]

To an extent, and as allowed by whatever particular constraints exist for that business. Letting you run whatever IDE you want, usually OK. Letting you install whatever operating system you want, well... there’s lots of reasons you may choose to not support that choice, that have nothing at all to do with maturity. If your jobs was improving developer experience, there’s only so many times you can come up with solutions that work great for everybody except that one guy on Arch, before you give up.

[_y5hn]

This is more related to how organizations work. That larger organizations tend to need to streamline more in order to scale up number of employees, and do more to maintain acceptable security simply because there's that many more people on board.

If policy is install whatever you want, and if you get hacked, you're fired! This just won't stand in court. So policy is that IT department is responsible for installations, IT department gets the blame. Infrastructure is sort of "outsourced" within the company.

If you were accountable for those younger first-timers running I2P and Tor within security perimeter, what would you do?

[AmericanChopper]

Lower down the tread I mentioned vendor due diligence, specifically because I’ve done so many vendor security reviews. But there’s more to it than that. You might also need to be threat modelling it, legal will need to review the ToS and privacy policy. You probably need to figure out the impact on other services too. If you’re in a regulated organisation, there could be any number of other things you have to do, and on going compliance costs. If you work in a bank, and somebody wants to install Gentoo, you’d have to figure out how to run anti-virus on it, how to centralise patches for it, how to install endpoint DLP, make sure it has the correct web proxy configuration... the costs can easily stack up.

[closeparen]

Yes, you need to do all those things, and it is expensive. The organization's choice not to pay those costs to provide an environment suitable for engineering work (not every single one someone could ask for, but one) reflects its views towards engineering.

It may be correct for them. But for you, as a candidate, it's a good indicator that you'd be happier in the kind of company where engineering has the power to get that done.

Between jamfcloud, osquery, munki, etc. there are plenty of companies and tools out there catering to IT departments that take this seriously.

[xenonite]

A hammer is not always the best tool.

Edit: what did you mean by "a set" of standardized toosl? Like the set {Windows 10, Linux of some distribution, macOS 10.15, iOS, Android}?

Even then, what if some app does not work on Windows 10? Or what if you need a 32 bit app running on macOS?

[AmericanChopper]

But if your 10,000 employees each need a hammer, getting them all the same one, from the same vendor, with the same support contract might just make sense.

Edit to your edit: whatever particular sets of tools the business needs. Whether it’s laptops, thin clients, operating systems, IDEs, ticketing systems...

> Even then, what if some app does not work on Windows 10?

If your business had standardized on Windows 10, then you’d hope checking whether things worked on Windows 10 would be part of their procurement process.

> Or what if you need a 32 bit app running on macOS?

You choose something else. Like any business running MacOS would have to do.

[xenonite]

And then there are some with very small or very big hands. Would you give them a different hammer, or would you criticize their subpar performance?

[AmericanChopper]

I’d probably just pick a better analogy. If the job can be done on the operating system provided, then it can be done equally well by anybody using that operating system. No need to grow bigger hands.

[xenonite]

The analogy is perfect in my opinion.

Like the body, everyone's brain is different.

[krapht]

I would ask what's going on that couldn't be solved with cygwin or virtual box.

[xenonite]

This largely depends on the job. Some tasks can even be done with a locked down iPad, some not at all.

[globular-toast]

It is stupid. There's no room for growth if you standardise tools. What they should be doing is standardising protocols. There's a big difference.

[AmericanChopper]

They already did. They settled on NTLM. I hope your chosen thing supports it, or you’ll have to pick something else.

[Karupan]

> One company told me yes for the first one, but when I got there I found Linux was completely unsupported by the draconian IT department

Happened with me as well (but I use a macbook). I won’t call it draconian. The IT department usually has to deal with a large number of hardware/software support requests on a daily basis. It’s quite understandable that they won’t have all the answers for a platform they’ve never used/supported before.

[globular-toast]

I didn't say it was draconian for not supporting Linux, just that it was draconian. It was widely recognised in the part of the business I was in that the IT department was holding the company back when it came to technology.

And, in any case, I wasn't asking any questions about Linux, I just wanted to connect to the network. My current company lets me use whatever weird distro I want (even Arch, btw), but they won't officially support it. That's fine. I can, however, ask them to support standards that I need (rather than specific support for some distro).

[codeisawesome]

I completely understand that that IT department sounds draconian and lazy.