

Ask HN: Mac or PC - why does it matter? - elliottcarlson

First of all, the title might be a little misleading - this has nothing to do with the benefits of the two, and is certainly not an attempt to start a flame war of any kind;<p>My question is, why do startups make a clear distinction as to the platform they want you to work on? I was just looking through the new threads and noticed Harvest's listing for job opportunities (http://www.getharvest.com/careers) and the listing says that a "Mac of your choice" comes standard with every position. Does it really matter? If you have a top notch developer ready to work for you, does their operating environment really make a difference if you were to hire them?
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jdietrich
"Mac of your choice" is perhaps shorthand for "we give developers good
hardware", but I think in the case of Harvest it's a cultural thing.

I'm a Mac fan, in large part because Apple hardware embodies what I consider
good design - quality materials, elegance through simplicity and a general
drive towards purity of form. Harvest describe themselves as a "design and
technology company" and have a clear sense of how their work ought to look and
feel. I would be apprehensive about hiring someone who didn't like Macs
because it is likely that we would strongly disagree on basic tenets of
design. For the same reason that fashion houses judge job applicants based on
what they wear, I wouldn't trust the judgement of a developer or designer who
would choose to use a Dell or HP machine.

Don't get me wrong, if I'm looking for an admin then I'm hiring the guy with a
Lenovo x201s running Ubuntu every day of the week, for exactly the same
reasons - your preferences say something about what you consider important. I
want to hire front-end designers who can't bear for one second to sit on a bad
chair in front of an ugly computer and I want to hire admins that wear utility
belts and write device drivers for fun.

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buro9
Hardware and OS choices tend to follow technology choices already made.

These can be related to the languages in use, some languages will dictate
setup (.Net will be Windows, iOS will be Mac).

If language doesn't dictate it, then whatever is most commonly in use already
is normally continued. There's not much point in having every developer use
their own bespoke setup as you want to spin up dev environments quickly to be
able to deal with growth, disaster recovery and just good practise like having
your dev environments resemble your production environments.

Macs make good choices because on a Mac you can dev anything with VirtualBox.

At work I'm on a Mac Pro and dev inside of Ubuntu VMs with a Windows VM set
aside for testing.

Anyhow, I don't think it matters so much about the individual, the selection
of one or the other is usually to help normalise the dev environments and to
keep things maintainable.

~~~
NiloParedes
Definitely agree with you. I would add that choice is quite often made by the
technology leadership which of course is a corollary to the technology choices
already made. One last point, I will make is that cost factors in at some
point. The interesting thing about cost, though, is it is often seen through
two different prisms: upfront cost (which may may Macs more expensive) and
total cost of ownership (which may be the Windows PC.)

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JonoW
I think a company will try keep their environment the same, so if they're a
ruby shop and everyones on Macs, then it makes sense to keep it that way. If
you're a big enterprise shop doing .Net and everyone is on Windows, they're
going to keep everyone on PCs. If the shop is really small enough to let
people choose which platform they want, I guess that could work, although they
make get caught out on some issues like license costs.

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rabc
Almost all new technologies (NoSQL, node.js, etcs) are running primarily on
Unix, so Mac is better if you don't want/like to deal with Linux style and at
the same time need an Unix environment to run and debug systems with this
technologies.

And a personal opinion: don't ask me exactly why, but I do prefer coding on
Mac rather on Windows.

~~~
elliottcarlson
I can accept this to an extent - I have our environment set up with virtual
machines running replicas of our production environment mostly to ensure that
code will work once moved in to production - this let's my dev team work
platform agnostic while maintaining the reliability of code consistency.

~~~
rabc
Yes, this is a good solution.

But once I worked this way, and everyone was using the same VM. It was a mess
and painful slow.

I think the better option is have the best of both worlds: a VM to make final
tests, when needed, and let your developer choose the best environment.

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badmash69
It matters in the context of scaling the enterprise and not individual. A lone
wolf programmer could use whatever rig and be productive.

In a large team environment, meetings have to be scheduled ( Outlook+
Exchange), SRS documents have to be changed and tracked ( Word), shared (
dropbox/ sharepoint) etc. etc. Having a PC enables everyone to work well in a
large groups without management thinking very hard about issues like systemes
integration etc. You could say that individual choice is sacrificed for the
greater good --- team productivity.

With VMware , everyone can get their own Linux or Solaris based test
environment.

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tonyarkles
This may be a regional thing (or a bias thing), but I've found that most of
the really talented developers around here tend to develop on Macs and keep a
Windows VM handy for testing there when necessary.

At a previous job, it was assumed that the developers wanted Macs, but they
had the choice if they wanted. I don't think I once heard someone say "I'd
really prefer to work on a PC". This was primarily a web development firm, so
it didn't really matter which environment you used. There was a smaller group
that was developing some .Net desktop software, and even they preferred to use
Mac+Windows VM than to have a PC.

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smoyer
Mac ... because there's a completely legal way to run Mac, Windows and Linux
on a single platform via VirtualBox. If you're developing web 2.0
applications, you'll be able to test all the common browser varieties.

Of course you can purchase a copy of Mac OS X and do the same thing on Linux
(my current choice) or Windows. I just can't justify the extra cost of Mac
hardware (yes ... it's nice) for a desktop system. For a laptop, I might very
well choose a MacBook of some sort.

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damoncali
I've never worked at a startup that required use of a specific platform unless
it was tied to development (.NET, of course, requires Windows, Rails strongly
encourages Macs, Cocoa requires Macs).

And yes, I would be very suspicious of someone who wanted to do .NET
development on a Mac or Cocoa development on Windows. I'm sure both are
technically possible, but rather poor choices.

Outside of that, Microsoft is pretty expensive, so I can see not wanting to
pay for it.

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Tycho
If we're not talking a large number of machines, then I've always thought Macs
would be a good choice simply for the lack of virus/security threats alone.
Never really seen that expressed though.

~~~
bendmorris
PC doesn't necessarily imply Windows. You could get the same security benefits
out of a PC running Linux.

~~~
SerpentJoe
What DOES the term PC imply? I don't mean to try to get at a sensible a priori
definition of "PC" - I'm aware that as far as the world is concerned they're
just branding terms used by Apple. But where the delineation is obvious when
we're considering nothing except Windows and Mac OS, it gets greyer when we
consider Linux, BSD and so on. Could I have some hardware custom built, and
write my own operating system for it, and call it a personal computer that's
not a PC, or does only Apple have that power?

~~~
Tycho
I don't think anybody referred to Acorn Computers as PCs (so, no, not only
Apple).

PC means different things according to the context, but the main ones are

a) IBM-compatible PC. Which means Windows/MS-DOS.

b) Personal computer, which means Mac

The 'I'm a PC' advertising campaign, while quite entertaining, seems a bit
outdated now IMO. Probably because compatibility issues aren't much of a
headache these days for Mac/PC owners, who primarily just go on Facebook and
check their email. Seems weird that Windows users would still think of
themselves as 'PC' people.

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geophile
Of course it doesn't matter. That's a job perk. It also helps shape the
applicant pool in desirable ways, I think. If I'm doing the hiring, and you
really prefer developing code in a Windows environment over any kind of Unix
(which includes Mac), then that's one strike against you.

~~~
JonoW
Eh, tech snobbery, hate it. Wouldn't want to work for someone so closed
minded.

