3 ms·
I’ve contracted in lots of large enterprise, and software engineers who prefer (and are provisioned) Macs are everywhere. I’ve even seen a number of .NET teams
by AmericanChopper 6y ago
I’ve contracted in lots of large enterprise, and software engineers who prefer (and are provisioned) Macs are everywhere. I’ve even seen a number of .NET teams who bootcamp with them. I’m contracting in a reasonably large bank right now, and most of the people in my office use MacBooks.
It’s true that large enterprise is slow and cumbersome. But they really don’t care too much if they’re buying you a MacBook, or a surface, or a Dell. Their main concern is whether they can properly manage all their devices, which isn’t too hard to do these days. Whether a large enterprise has MacBooks or not depends a lot more on whether or not they’ve figured out how to use JAMF than it does anything else.
- oblio 6y agoYeah, but check out large enterprises where software engineers are not the norm, common, or some times, not even present at all :-)
- AmericanChopper 6y agoThere is no such large enterprise. You need software engineers at the very least to operate an ERP, and any organisation that doesn’t rely heavily on an ERP to operate is not a large enterprise. Any large enterprise will also have an infrastructure team, comprised of people just as likely to have strong preferences about their operating systems. Technical and design staff may make up a relatively small portion of the headcount for some of them, but the Windows-only enterprise is becoming increasingly less common. The primary reason being that the tools they need to support other operating systems are simply more capable and accessible than they have been in the past.
- oblio 6y agoI don't know in what kind of circles you mingle, but the software engineers I know that are working on ERPs are VEEEERY different to the ones that are working in FAANGS and startups. Think (Notepad++ and JDeveloper) vs (vim/emacs and cargo). And as far as enterprise IT, there are a ton of Windows infrastructure folks, and again, there's little overlap between those and FAANG types. Plus infrastructure folks frequently hate Macs, for example (the stuff to manage fleets of Macs is vastly underpowered compared to stuff used to manage fleets of Windows PCs). Plus even in those companies, the ERP & infra folks are maybe 1-5-10% of the workforce and they're generally in supporting roles (frequently they're temps or consultants), not in core business roles. Nobody listens to them :-)) And they generally want to get rid of them, they're seen as an expense. I do agree that Windows-only places are becoming less common, but in big enterprises it's far from agreed that going outside the Microsoft ecosystem has a good ROI.
- AmericanChopper 6y agoI think you’re being a bit judgemental and overly stereotyping people here. In any case, the reason enterprise adopts these technologies isn’t directly because of a technical ROI. It’s because giving people the tools that they want to use is generally seen as beneficial. Providing good UX to internal users is becoming just as trendy in enterprise as DevSecOps and Service Oriented Architecture is. There’s plenty of fairly obvious business reasons why enterprise would care about these things. One of the more important ones is that these organisations are competing FAANGs and startups to hire talent. If you walked around the bank office I was working in today I doubt you’d be able to tell it apart from a typical well-funded startup.
- pjmlp 6y agoI bet it is an US bank.