4 ms·

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

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; 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?

smoyer 16y ago
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.
geophile 16y ago
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 16y ago
  Eh, tech snobbery, hate it. Wouldn't want to work for someone so closed minded.
- elliottcarlson 16y ago
  I would never hold an environment against a developer - the talent is what matters most to me, and turning someone down because of that seems foolish to me.
tonyarkles 16y ago
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.
buro9 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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.)
JonoW 16y ago
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.
Tycho 16y ago
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 16y ago
  PC doesn't necessarily imply Windows. You could get the same security benefits out of a PC running Linux.
  - SerpentJoe 16y ago
    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 16y ago
      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.
rabc 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    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.
- clojurerocks 16y ago
  I am a developer and ran linux for many years. Unfortunately my system died a year ago and i ended up going with a windows laptop due to cost. I can definitely say that windows is a pain to develop with for exactly the reason you mention. Many of the most popular tools today are built on unix and windows doesnt support many of them unless you use cygwin which i prefer not to. With Mac you get a nice interface and unix system underneath. Also ive been getting into mobile development and being that im on windows i cant develop for iphone or ipad which is frustrating. If i had a Mac i could do everything. Plus Mac does have a style to it that is more developer friendly and designer friendly. Its kind of like how Starbucks used to be or maybe still is. You got Starbucks because it had a vibe to it.
damoncali 16y ago
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.
jdietrich 16y ago
"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.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
badmash69 16y ago
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.

smoyer 16y ago

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.

geophile 16y ago

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 16y ago
Eh, tech snobbery, hate it. Wouldn't want to work for someone so closed minded.
elliottcarlson 16y ago
I would never hold an environment against a developer - the talent is what matters most to me, and turning someone down because of that seems foolish to me.

tonyarkles 16y ago

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.

buro9 16y ago

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 16y ago
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.)

JonoW 16y ago

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.

Tycho 16y ago

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 16y ago
PC doesn't necessarily imply Windows. You could get the same security benefits out of a PC running Linux.
- SerpentJoe 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    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.

rabc 16y ago

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 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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.
clojurerocks 16y ago
I am a developer and ran linux for many years. Unfortunately my system died a year ago and i ended up going with a windows laptop due to cost. I can definitely say that windows is a pain to develop with for exactly the reason you mention. Many of the most popular tools today are built on unix and windows doesnt support many of them unless you use cygwin which i prefer not to. With Mac you get a nice interface and unix system underneath. Also ive been getting into mobile development and being that im on windows i cant develop for iphone or ipad which is frustrating. If i had a Mac i could do everything. Plus Mac does have a style to it that is more developer friendly and designer friendly. Its kind of like how Starbucks used to be or maybe still is. You got Starbucks because it had a vibe to it.

damoncali 16y ago

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.

jdietrich 16y ago

"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.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

badmash69 16y ago

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.