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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.