There's no forcing done here actually. I worked on a Windows stack for many years (including loving the Visual Studio IDE). Eclipse or other IDEs would not be c

There's no forcing done here actually. I worked on a Windows stack for many years (including loving the Visual Studio IDE). Eclipse or other IDEs would not be counter-cultural at all, it's just there isn't a need for that given the languages we work in. I also have 2 Windows machines at home, 1 Ubuntu VM, 2 Ubuntu machines (although one died), access to CentOS, and recently got an MacBook Air for home too. I thought I would be best at my work with a MBP and chose that among my options between a Mac/PC. It's true that we don't have that many requirements at that low-level right now, but we certainly do have some work done lower than the web-stack -- we even got an ex-Ksplice engineer joining us to help with that. But maybe I could also have included some of the deficiencies too, to make it a little more balanced--I agree with you it does seem too rosy with what I had mentioned, but overall the experience has been really positive. I've tried to keep things as real as possible, no-holds barred, instead of being filled with corporate imagery. So you can see the messy desks, cardboard boxes, boring food, lack of 6-core Xeons with 12GB RAMs :)