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Do engineers have root on their workstations? I think this is a proxy for a lot of culture. "Enterprise," bureaucracy, trust, social status of developers, corp

Do engineers have root on their workstations? I think this is a proxy for a lot of culture. "Enterprise," bureaucracy, trust, social status of developers, corporate IT mindset vs. Silicon Valley mindset. I work at a big company. We are public. We have groups that handle PCI data. We have groups that handle HIPAA data. We all have root on our Macbooks. So it is definitely possible, even as a Serious Business with compliance requirements, if you care enough about developer experience to make it happen.

JoshuaRowe 6y ago
Yes. I am not sure I have ran into this problem in a super major way before, but I remember not being able to do some things at previous gigs. I could not imagine having to ask to install software or config to just get my job done. In the past, we have also dealt with HIPPA data, and it was nice to be trusted with that as well.
- fire7000 6y ago
  Most work on government owned machines are locked down from even power users
kls 6y ago
Cannot upvote this one enough, I once worked for a company where not only did you not have root, you had to remote desktop to a jump box, to remote desktop to your in-datacenter workstation (which so happened to be a standard image that every developer got so no deviation) They did this under the misguided notion that this limited the chance of software IP theft. Best part they wrote antiquated CBTware for college campuses. A tangential question would be, if I need a piece of hardware or software what is the process from purchase procurement to it being installed on my machine? This can sniff out several red flags, from there is a lot of bureaucracy to get software on your machine, to we are the type of company that will pay a person a decent developers salary and then just let them sit there because we will not buy a $100/$500/$1000 tool to make them more productive.
fancyfish 6y ago
Awesome question to ask. Anecdotally in the financial industry, the corporate IT mindset is rampant even at supposedly “cutting-edge” algo trading shops. IT draws very bold boundary lines (no root access, unable to use new third-party libraries without a song and dance with InfoSec, locked down Windows machines that must SSH into Linux hosts for dev work, etc) and it sets the entire engineering culture. This question will tell you about the culture as a whole, beyond how smooth/frustrating your developer experience will be. A good gauge for how modern or stale the stack is, whether continuous deployment exists, how top—down or bottom-up the culture is, etc.
stonecharioteer 6y ago
I work at a fintech company, and you have heard of us. Be forewarned. My company is "woke" and gives you `sudo` access on your mac. However, this mac is useless. The firewall rules prevent us from running a local kubernetes cluster, and most open source software is iffy on it because of JAMF. `root` is not enough. I want control over my workstation. I refuse to give it up just because IT is worried about some people who watch porn on office laptops. I am not those people, stop penalizing power users just because others flaunt your rules or are unable to grok them. Edit: I'd kill to join a company that says BYOD and you can use Linux (any flavour).
- nasalgoat 6y ago
  I'm curious to hear how JAMF makes open source difficult. As far as I can tell it mostly just allows provisioning and preventing you from running certain apps, so it's about the config you put in place and not JAMF itself.
  - closeparen 6y ago
    Yeah we have JAMF and it’s not intrusive. Crowdstrike causes performance problems sometimes.
renewiltord 6y ago
Great question. Cuts to the core and answers so many other questions without being vague like "what's the culture like? Do you feel empowered?".

JoshuaRowe 6y ago

Yes. I am not sure I have ran into this problem in a super major way before, but I remember not being able to do some things at previous gigs. I could not imagine having to ask to install software or config to just get my job done. In the past, we have also dealt with HIPPA data, and it was nice to be trusted with that as well.

fire7000 6y ago
Most work on government owned machines are locked down from even power users

kls 6y ago

Cannot upvote this one enough, I once worked for a company where not only did you not have root, you had to remote desktop to a jump box, to remote desktop to your in-datacenter workstation (which so happened to be a standard image that every developer got so no deviation) They did this under the misguided notion that this limited the chance of software IP theft. Best part they wrote antiquated CBTware for college campuses. A tangential question would be, if I need a piece of hardware or software what is the process from purchase procurement to it being installed on my machine? This can sniff out several red flags, from there is a lot of bureaucracy to get software on your machine, to we are the type of company that will pay a person a decent developers salary and then just let them sit there because we will not buy a $100/$500/$1000 tool to make them more productive.

fancyfish 6y ago

Awesome question to ask. Anecdotally in the financial industry, the corporate IT mindset is rampant even at supposedly “cutting-edge” algo trading shops. IT draws very bold boundary lines (no root access, unable to use new third-party libraries without a song and dance with InfoSec, locked down Windows machines that must SSH into Linux hosts for dev work, etc) and it sets the entire engineering culture. This question will tell you about the culture as a whole, beyond how smooth/frustrating your developer experience will be. A good gauge for how modern or stale the stack is, whether continuous deployment exists, how top—down or bottom-up the culture is, etc.

stonecharioteer 6y ago

I work at a fintech company, and you have heard of us. Be forewarned. My company is "woke" and gives you `sudo` access on your mac. However, this mac is useless. The firewall rules prevent us from running a local kubernetes cluster, and most open source software is iffy on it because of JAMF. `root` is not enough. I want control over my workstation. I refuse to give it up just because IT is worried about some people who watch porn on office laptops. I am not those people, stop penalizing power users just because others flaunt your rules or are unable to grok them. Edit: I'd kill to join a company that says BYOD and you can use Linux (any flavour).

nasalgoat 6y ago
I'm curious to hear how JAMF makes open source difficult. As far as I can tell it mostly just allows provisioning and preventing you from running certain apps, so it's about the config you put in place and not JAMF itself.
- closeparen 6y ago
  Yeah we have JAMF and it’s not intrusive. Crowdstrike causes performance problems sometimes.

renewiltord 6y ago

Great question. Cuts to the core and answers so many other questions without being vague like "what's the culture like? Do you feel empowered?".