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All the coverage on this memo has missed this point. I guess they can’t imagine a company giving its employees two computers! You can BYO ChromeOS devices too
by wffurr 3y ago
All the coverage on this memo has missed this point. I guess they can’t imagine a company giving its employees two computers!
You can BYO ChromeOS devices too which make great thin terminals to a remote workstation or cloud VM. I have a whole bunch from dogfooding preproduction Chromebooks.
- danpalmer 3y agoI feel like much of the internal coverage missed the point. There were a lot of people arguing in bad faith, ignoring the fact that the whole idea was clearly tied to the rollout of the particular workflow where no internet would be needed on the machines in question. Most devs still aren't working like that yet, and so pushed back hard.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lokar 3y agoA bunch of people with admin access used a setup like this for a while shortly after the china hack years ago. It’s not that bad.
- jeffbee 3y agoBy “bunch” you mean the entire SRE org. I felt like it was a good setup, but I also felt that the long-term strategy of reducing the access necessary to operate the infrastructure was a good one. But why not both, as the child in the meme asks?
- lokar 3y agoFar from all, mostly traffic and a few others
- hinkley 3y agoMy first job out of college I ended up with the absolutely slowest box in the office, which definitely pushed me toward optimizing our app (it wasn't even good on fast machines, but it was tragic on slow), but compile times were murder. We had a Sparcstation somewhere in the office being used as a mail server and nothing else. I don't recall how but I managed to SMB or NFS mount a directory so that I could edit code on my piddly little desktop but compile it on the Sparc. First time Java really worked as advertised for me. Saved me loads of time and let me iterate on ideas that I don't think I or my boss would have had the patience for otherwise. I'm not entirely keen on language servers, but those would be another area where distributed computing could come in handy. I think what might be missing though is a multitenant version. Everyone on my team has a duplicate model of our dependencies loaded into Webstorm and it's a pig.
- andrepd 3y ago>I ended up with the absolutely slowest box in the office, which definitely pushed me toward optimizing our app Aside, but I 100% believe most developers of user-facing programs should be forced to use their app on a slow computer/phone with a slow internet connection before being able to ship it.
- wffurr 3y agoIt seems so weird to me to want to use Linux on the desktop. This is not The Year. I decided at the very start of my career, before Google, to use a laptop at the primary interface and only use workstation / dev environment / etc. remotely. That way I have the same working experience at my desk, at a cafe, on my desk at home. The only thing that changes is the number and size of monitors. It's worked out really well, and during the COVID era it only got better due to investments in the remote workflows. I wouldn't even notice if my VM lost internet access and root.
- 40yearoldman 3y agoI would still want Linux on my laptop. It has been “the year” for Linux on the desktop for the last 10 years, even more so if you use Emacs as your WM.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 3y agoI've been using Linux since I started nearly 5 years ago, plus the previous 8 at my last company. I don't have any major issues. SSH disconnects are still annoying. And mosh/tmux/screen don't do it for me.
- wffurr 3y agoMosh and tmux have worked great for me for the last 12 years. Different strokes I guess.
- throwbadubadu 3y agoWhat's wrong with the desktop at Linux, why "classical desktop" at all? I love my tiled wm setup so much since >10 years, and absolutely hate my corp windows desktop so much for everything it does to me. Gf similar regrets her chosing a private Mac Airbook everytime she uses it and swears to never buy one again every time she uses it (but uses it to seldom to consider just installing an Ubuntu, otherwise would do that)... so we are maybe strange people but > It seems so weird to me to want to use Linux on the desktop. This is not The Year. It seems so weird to me everybody considering their Windows or Mac as desktop ;)
- 3y ago
- UncleMeat 3y agoYeah this is the unfortunate outcome of the past two years. Memegen is now primed to take anything in the maximally critical way.
- shemnon42 3y agoMemegen has been toxic for way more than two years. Even before they gave the holiday bonus devices to school children.
- LargeTomato 3y agoThe days of good faith, logical, respectful arguments is gone. Googlers (the ones on Memegen) have become a bunch of whining and bad faith actors.
- kajecounterhack 3y agoMemegen is unbearably whiny now, but doesn't feel like it's because Google hires whiners. It feels more like valid employee feedback, accurately capturing valid worker sentiment toward shitty, randomizing leadership.
- gipp 3y agoIt can be both.
- kajecounterhack 3y agoThe cultural shift was basically overnight, after big decisions by leadership. Seems to point to the latter rather than the former.
- LargeTomato 3y agoMemegen is toxic and, today, a net negative to the company.
- jeffbee 3y agoIs the internal discourse aware of “cleanroom” or has that institutional memory disappeared?
- Nullabillity 3y agoSounds like fighting against that sort of miserable workflow is part of the point.
- varelse 3y agoSure, they give you two computers. But you better not ask for a GPU!
- adolph 3y agoDo you get one of those m2 coral to click in there?
- philjohn 3y agoThe other option is provisioning dev servers as VMs on big hosts, which some other companies do. That’s where the build and development happens, using an IDE locally on the issued laptop which uses remoting.
- grrdotcloud 3y agoI've been 100% ChromeOS for ten years. All my dev work, personal, and internet while I work. KVM to swap. External screens. Strict separation of work and life. No key logging like the work system. No fillers.
- dheera 3y agoGood for you, my personal life often involves connecting to real hardware in the field and ChromeOS doesn't work for that.
- jrockway 3y agoI also ran that setup when I worked at Google. I liked it a lot. ChromeOS was a great desktop OS; even when I was in the office, I just ssh'd to my Linux workstation from a Chromebox. Thus, "local" and "remote" had the same experience.