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by danpalmer 21 days ago
Why does a company in GitHub's place allow employees to install random VSCode extensions?! That seems grossly irresponsible.
3 comments

Because centralized management of resources is the death of innovation, intrinsic motivation and speed?

The dreaded "process" to get a single tool registered, working and allowed, is the reason a company is slow, dysfunctional and usually failing at a task.

The security tax and speeding tickets on everything are a luxury destroying much value.

This is the new old way. This was fine before irresponsible use of AI. Between vibe coding and using AI to find vulnerabilities as a result of vibes, I'm afraid that we will have to find ways to have more controlled environments.
It seems likely that some companies where the trade off shifts will head in that direction.

The problem with controlled environments is that even when done sensibly by people with good intentions they do slow things down and a lot of orgs will decide the trade off isn’t worth that.

I’ve worked for companies that did have much more controlled environments but given everything is made of a thousand packages these days and those packages have CVE’s and you do need to patch doing it after the fact is a recipe for paralysis.

Move fast, break things, get internal repository leaked and lose all the 9s.
Im pretty sure GitHub reliability issues are a result of Microsoft centralized management (i.e migrate everything to azure, the only allowed cloud)
Tbh, at this point why does it matter if it was MS or not?
I don’t think it does, I was just pointing out their issues are likely caused by the centralized resource managementent (mentioned by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48219114 you responded to), and not the „move fast, break things“ aspect. Just my guess. But yeah, it doesn’t matter if it is MS or GitHub itself
Your company getting hacked because of random plugins for emerging or dysfunctional ecosystems that don’t have enterprise management solutions yet is worth it to avoid friction?
Yes and no.

The friction they should have probably had here is: did this employee need access to 3,800 internal repos?

I'm with the poster above in believing restricting what you can install makes a lot of things more difficult, but if you're going to take the risk you should be limiting the blast radius.

It's true. But at the same time, isn't it crazy to conclude that a company should restrict their developers from using their own developer productivity tools and services? If Microsoft devs shouldn't use random VSCode extensions, how could anyone?
You're assuming they allow it, but it might be against policy.
I’m pretty sure there is an policy on their internal wiki saying you shouldn’t do that.

Problem is: most employees don’t care to read these. Although I’m sure something like this could have been checked for during commit.

They can enforce it with an MDM. Policy should be enforced where possible not just notified to people.
Absolutely agree. But enforcing is so much more effort than creating wiki pages with LLMs.
Fair point, I hadn't considered this, but wouldn't they just disallow it?

Like, I use a VSCode fork at work, but the enforced extensions store backend is based on an allowlist and extensions need reviewing to be available there.

When I worked at Amazon, I had to run a special Amazon Linux. But I could just install whatever I wanted. I used emacs with whatever plugins I wanted.

Big tech can be suprisingly not locked down!

Ah, that must have been AL2023, right? IIRC, it's tightly integrated with internal deployment toolchains like Apollo and Brazil (Amazon's internal package management and build systems).