[jetti]

>Of course, no one would use corporate resources for job-hunting, right? I know that folks here, get all huffy, when I suggest that happens rather frequently.

  Where I work we have a take home exercise we have candidates do and then when we have the interview with that person we review their code with them and ask them to make incremental changes to see how they handle the asks with their communication skills and their technical ability. I interviewed one individual who couldn’t even get the REPL started for their project and as they were struggling trying to get it to work I heard them mumble to themself “I should have just use my work computer”. The fact they couldn’t get the most basic aspect of the project to work on their personal meant that they did their coding assignment on their work computer

[beebeepka]

Interesting. What makes work provided computers better suited for coding?

Me, I don't recall using company hardware for anything even remotely personal in many years. It's stupid because they are loaded with all kinds of spyware.

[mr_mitm]

When you spend eight hours coding on your work computer, you make lots of little tweaks to improve workflow. If you then do nearly no coding on your home computer, it's unlikely that you will perform the same tweaks. I try to keep my systems set up almost identically, but that's a lot of work. (I now try to use ansible for that but after playing around for a bit I'm having doubts if it was the right choice. Keeping everything in sync is not exactly ergonomic.)

Some particular quirk of autocompletion could become almost pure muscle memory, and if it's suddenly missing, you notice.

[turboponyy]

It sounds like you'd benefit a lot from Nix/NixOS [1], if not just home-manager[2].

1. https://nixos.org/

2. https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager

[grepfru_it]

Work computer is windows with wsl, home computer is Ubuntu. Work computer I need to develop in IntelliJ and vscode. At home I can use copilot or local LLMs, at work I cannot (nor several other useful extensions) At work I use maven and I have to spend 15minutes dinking with project settings anytime I need to compile a new project. At home I have admin privs, at work it’s a set of hoops to get temporary admin access so I forgo things like system environment variables.

I am skeptical that nix or home manager would solve these problems. So I just have a specific setup at work, that is typically more advanced and automated than my home system. My leet code interviews suffer because of this. Just makes me realize that coding interviews using an environment that does not mimic the workplace is just excluding senior developers (read: old people) who don’t have the time or patience to jump through these hoops for 15minutes of placating a recently hired college grad

[lijok]

Nix evangelists should seriously consider putting the breaks on advertising Nix until its horrible UX is fixed. I’m struggling to even discuss Nix as an option at work because every engineer I bring it up to has had bad first impressions.

[metabeard]

Anecdotal comment: Check out Chezmoi. Its worked really well for me.

[mr_mitm]

Thanks, I never heard of it before and it looks really interesting.

However, it seems that it does not cover all of my needs: https://github.com/twpayne/chezmoi/discussions/1510#discussi...

Maybe I should use Ansible for system-wide configuration and chezmoi for dotfiles in $HOME.

[gilleain]

I read that as the literal letters for like 10 seconds before realising it was French for 'at home'. Made me laugh.

[bryanrasmussen]

when you get a work computer you have to get it set up to do your work immediately. The work you are doing is probably the work you will be interviewing for thus you have everything you need to set up for the coding challenge already set up on your work computer.

When you get a personal computer you do not need to set up all the things you need to do your work immediately, so you will do the setup of things as you need them.

thus if you get a new personal computer it might not be fully setup yet.

If you are of the age that you have kids you may not have time to do any sorts of personal projects, if so and you have an old personal computer it may not be up to date with what is needed for the coding project because you have not been doing a lot of stuff.

If you have kids or other problems your personal computer may end up broken or unusable and you might not have the money at the moment or the reason to buy a new one.

[bryanrasmussen]

I mean the first one is probably not right either, since often you need to do some particular thing or use some library you are unfamiliar with but it is at least more right than on your personal computer for the other reasons listed.

[rewmie]

> Interesting. What makes work provided computers better suited for coding?

They already have working software development environments. It's a process that can be time-consuming and is done once in a blue moon (basically when you need to reimage the machine). In the meantime, all changes to your software dev environment are gradual, and your work-provided computer ends up being configured like a software development pet instead of cattle.

Moreso if your company adopted/enforces internal development tools.

Ask yourself this: how many times have you went through a complete OS reinstall and subsequently had to setup a working software dev environment? Is this something you have automated? Most people do not.

[bakuninsbart]

I've been in almost exactly this situation, although the issue was rather that I have a Linux tower without camera/microphone and a Windows laptop for playing some games or doing Microsoft / office stuff. Setting it up to anything resembling my real dev experience is probably a day or two of work, and the first time I used it for a job interview I probably seemed less than competent... I also have a work MacBook, but so far haven't used it for applying to other jobs, that would be kinda weird.

[biztos]

I have met people who can’t really code outside an IDE. If someone has a full JetBrains setup at work, and never worked any other way, it might be really hard for them to change code on demand without it.

I expect there is a similar, but worse, problem growing with CoPilot and friends.

[jrumbut]

Just that it's set up in a particular way, I suspect. A long running project/organization will accrete plenty of tools, scripts, configurations, etc that make their environment different than another using a similar stack.

[wuiheerfoj]

For a few roles I’ve been allowed to buy a top of the range MacBook and expense it without any contact with IT - no spyware, no anything. To that end, I never felt the need to buy a personal laptop and do basically everything on my work laptop

[grepfru_it]

If your company ever has to go through litigation, all of your personal data will be at risk during discovery. Always keep work and personal separate. This includes mobile phone

[wincy]

I don’t even use the same OS at work. I use macOS at home, but work at a Windows shop on a Dell.

I guess this is because in college and my first few dev jobs used Macs. A nice side effect is my wife hasn’t had any tech support complaints since we switched, it has been great.

I’d still never use company hardware for personal stuff. I don’t even login to Spotify on the company laptop.

[moron4hire]

That's weird, why did she stop asking you for help? I'm on Windows and my wife is on macOS and she still hits me up for tech support problems.

[vuln]

Could you give a few examples of _tech support problems_ she had with macOS that was escalated to you?

[wincy]

Okay to be fair she was on Ubuntu.

She doesn’t seem to have issues with macOS at all though, aside from the one time I had her using a VPN and it expired which is totally on me and disabling it was nonobvious.

[msh]

If you don't really code in your spare time your home computer might be unsuitable. For example a Chromebook

[jasonwatkinspdx]

> Interesting. What makes work provided computers better suited for coding?

Some people only know how to code within the environment managed by their corporation. This is increasingly the case with folks that have only worked at Kubernetes shops.

[rewmie]

> I interviewed one individual who couldn’t even get the REPL started for their project and as they were struggling trying to get it to work I heard them mumble to themself “I should have just use my work computer”. The fact they couldn’t get the most basic aspect of the project to work on their personal meant that they did their coding assignment on their work computer

I've been a candidate who "couldn't even get the most basic aspect of the project to work".

I had been working for years at a company that most developers in the world would sacrifice their firstborn to have a shot at being hired, and I've been using their work laptop for years on end. I considered switching gigs, I answered a recruiter's call, and I found myself in a technical interview using one of my own laptops. Only during the interview did it dawned upon me that my personal laptop had no development tools installed. Why? Because I never used it for work. Worse, I was used to my employer's automated process to setup software development environments, so I had no assurance that I could setup a fully working dev environments in 5 or 10 minutes, let alone the meeting's full hour. If you want to run Python as a REPL on Windows, good luck.

Thankfully my meeting ended up using a webapp to do the pair programming/coding challenge, but if I had to run code on my personal computer I would have to spend far more time setting it up than testing stuff, reschedule the meeting, or simply bail out.

Some companies allocate more than a day to get new candidates to set up a working dev environment and building a project, while assigning an experienced dev to guide them. I know that because I've onboarded half a dozen people and that's what it usually takes.

I'm reading your comment and I'm surprised you didn't noticed how your account does more to document how oblivious you and your team were to critical failures in your hiring process than in assessing the competence of a candidate. How many times per day do you need to setup a software dev environment? Is this how your company gets paid? Is that where you needed additional people to work on? No? Then why on earth are you evaluating them in a completely irrelevant domain? Don't you have people in your team who can spare some minutes documenting and automating that process?

By the way, following that interciew I was extended an offer for a senior position. If the recruiter was like you and I would have been evaluated on my ability to setup a working software dev environment in the allotted time, I'm sure I would have spent over half the meeting googling for where to download the interpreter and how to set it up.

[sbrt]

I can select "run Python as a REPL on Windows" in your post, right click, search and find an answer within a minute.

From my experience, onboarding at companies is a painful process due to internal software, specific setups for complex build processes and (frequently) permissions / annoying processes required for downloading and installing things. Those points are not applicable if you are using publicly available and well documented tools on your own machine.

[rewmie]

> I can select "run Python as a REPL on Windows" in your post, right click, search and find an answer within a minute.

That takes place only after you search for the python installer, download it, install it, check the environment flags, and restart your terminal of choice.

The web is jam-packed with examples of how problematic it is to setup and deploy Python on Windows, and we're not even touching the problem of how some fundamental packages, such as anything involving the file system, is either riddled with platform-specific gotchas or does not work at all.

Setting up a REPL is a far more involved process than it's being casually described in this thread.

[extr]

It can be that simple, but there are plenty of times where the easy route doesn’t work. Sure it’s solvable with 5 minutes of googling and applying the top stack overflow solution, but of course the interview is not the time for that. And there are many other aspects that can throw you off and give the unjust appearance of incompetence.

[jetti]

My anecdote was to show that there are in fact people who use their work computer in order to do projects related to their job search. You have made many assumptions based on my small paragraph.

First, this is a coding challenge that the candidate is given before the technical interview that is well defined in the expectations and is small in scope. They are not expected to spend more than an hour or two on it and they send the recruiter (who is an internal recruiter) a link to their github repo with their completed project before the technical interview is even scheduled. Candidates would have several days and potentially even a week between when they finished the project and when we have the technical interview. The candidates are also told that their project will be gone over in the technical part of the interview. I understand that there are circumstances that would prevent the individual from getting an environment set up on a personal computer but if that is case then just stick with using the work computer.

Second, I never even indicated if the individual was hired or not but you made the assumption that we passed on the candidate. The fact that the candidate couldn't get the repl started was just a tidbit that stuck out to me and I made the comment to my coworker as it is odd to me that a candidate would use their work computer for a job search. We just went with the fact we couldn't use a repl and had the candidate just talk out loud with what he would change when we added different scenarios/requirements.

For what it's worth, the candidate was using a Mac for their personal laptop and so all they would have had to do is run the following in their terminal and it would have gotten them pretty close to being able to run the repl

brew install clojure/tools/clojure

[rsynnott]

Generally, where the candidate is required to have a working local environment, companies will tell the candidate that in the prep material.

It’s surprising how often this is ignored.

[throwaway2037]

Jane Street?