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A word to the wise regarding your employment benefits, you say: "Shiny Apple Products Seriously, get whatever you want (PC users may have to justify themselves

• general_failure 13y ago
  Agree. Unnecessary PC prejudice for a company that has nothing to with PCs.
• kaspm 13y ago
  100% agree, developer here who sees snarky recruiting posts like this and immediately says no thanks. Makes it clear the company is gimmicky and not focused on the true challenges of software development: clarity, focus and rational decision-making
  • _lex 13y ago
    See my answer above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5614106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5614106. It's more rational, and more about focus than it seems.
    • kaspm 13y ago
      Yeah, there are many legitimate reasons to prefer Mac to Linux or Windows, not the least of which is that Ruby gems just work better on a Mac because they are developed there (regardless of whether you will have to figure out those problems when you deploy to your Linux-based production environment in AWS :P). The issue isn't whether you use Mac or PC but in the holier-than-thou attitude about it. You are recruiting a team of (potentially) one-trick ponies who are religious about making judgement calls. Probably a looooooooong stretch from just saying "Justify a PC" to you are building a uncompromising team but I would just say "The Best Equipment (We mostly use Apple)" would accomplish the same goal with less annoying language
  • jeremyjh 13y ago
    Yes the only problem is the snark. I prefer Linux; still if a job wanted me to use OSX I'd be totally fine with it. But a remark like this just puts me off.
• dangrossman 13y ago
  +1 to counteract the downvotes. This turns me off too. I know they're a Rails shop, and that's super popular with hardcore Apple fans, but Ruby code doesn't seem to mind when I write it on my Windows laptop. When I chose my machine, it outspec'd the MBP in every way (from screen to SSD/RAM to build quality) for less money -- not a valuable mindset at an early startup? The host OS doesn't matter all that much when you spend half your time SSH'd into Linux servers anyway.
  • misterS 13y ago
    not a valuable mindset at an early startup? This is what irks me, too. The startup I was working at (somewhere in Europe) was always short on money (there wasn't any VC funding), and I get it that this meant having to cut corners anywhere. But then the owner started to outfit every new employee with the latest mac book and a cinema display - for roughly 9000$. I had a (good) Thinkpad and a standard 24" monitor for a third of that price. Why they decided to throw out that much money on Apple while I couldn't order a spare keyboard I don't know.
    • eridius 13y ago
      On what planet does even the highest-specced MacBook Pro + external display cost even remotely close to $9000?
      • arnorhs 13y ago
        Welcome to Europe. Taxes, customs, shipping + crazy markup, and this is what you get: http://www.epli.is/tolvur/fartolvur/macbook-pro-15-retina-2-7ghz.html http://www.epli.is/tolvur/fartolvur/macbook-pro-15-retina-2-... - high specced rMBP is ~$4500. Add a monitor and and iphone and you're already there, at least pretty close.
        • eridius 13y ago
          Is there no better place to buy from? You can't buy from Apple directly? Because the markup on that linked store is absolutely insane.
• _lex 13y ago
  This is slightly less stupid/mean than it seems. Supporting only one set of systems (only mac, on latest OS), is much less complex and makes surviving hardware failures easier. At this stage, they probably don't have a guy managing hardware and helping when things break, so it really helps to reduce the number of moving parts, or (in this case) the diversity of moving parts.
  • etjossem 13y ago
    I can only speak for my company, but the advantages of equipment diversity outweigh the costs. We've already written "new developer" documentation for both Mac and Ubuntu, which we'd have to do anyway at a certain size. If the site looks bad on any type of monitor, we're able to spot the issue immediately. We can do native testing of IE without depending on VMs. And - last but certainly not least - we're all comfortable with our tools, regardless of previous experience.
• _pius 13y ago
  That will simply turn off some people and there is no reason for a self-interested business to do that. Actually, judging by your comment and the ensuing replies, it looks like listing the benefit this way is doing a great job attracting the people they want and filtering out those who wouldn't fit in there.
  • jkldotio 13y ago
    Any business where people who use a different windowing system to get to their editor and shell "don't fit in" is not a business many high level hackers would be interested in at all. Even PG's Lisp versus Blub argument is tenuous. Languages and OSes are a dime a dozen. What matters are algorithms and real world results. If you don't see that that's fine, but some real machine learning company thinking at the level of algorithms and not tools will eventually come along and eat your (company provided) lunch.
    • _pius 13y ago
      ... is not a business many high level hackers would be interested in at all. If you don't see that that's fine .... You sound very defensive about this, which leads to the flip side of your argument: any prospect who can't take the lightest of jabs at their pet platform is not a person many "high level" startups would be interested in at all.
      • danielweber 13y ago
        It's negging, before the first date has even happened.
      • jkldotio 13y ago
        The 81 upvotes (of 191 for the story as a whole) on my original post and the replies here with people overtly stating they'd like to work for the company but were immediately turned off by that phrase I think prove my point. If we consider the jobs page as a kind of landing page and were A/B testing different different phrases it's clear this one would not survive. I understand you are making an app on iOS though and it would be perfectly legitimate for you to have constraints on employee setups because of that. But for a company working on a RoR project where the window manager doesn't matter, who seem to be having trouble recruiting, I'd suggest the data here clearly indicates they should drop the phrase as there is no way (looking at those numbers) it is helping them filter out some trouble making characters with a bad attitude towards Apple, it's turning a huge number of people off. And as I said elsewhere, there are companies certainly paying more and certainly working on more interesting problems who don't do this.
• Odin9 13y ago
  Somewhat tangential: Are there many start-ups that allow talented tech people to build their own PC? I used to think most programmers knew hardware, but that apparently isn't or was never the case. Building PCs is second nature to me, and I could build a PC two times more performant than a Mac and probably half as expensive.
  • mixmastamyk 13y ago
    I agree, but it is largely a waste of time these days considering return on $/hr. That's important to a business; not so much at home.
  • onemorepassword 13y ago
    Can you bring that PC into an ad-hoc meeting with a few of your co-workers? I'm not talking a Meeting(TM), just sitting together to figure some stuff out, maybe put some things up on the beamer, present your work, share your knowledge? This is why I don't want people building their own PC, even though generally they can pick any tool they like: it shows they have the wrong priorities (at least for our team). Unless your job involves something really resource intensive, a high-end laptop (combined with external screens, keyboard and such) is more than good enough and much more practical. Don't get me wrong, I love building my own machine, I build my own home server from scratch just for the hell of it every few years. But simply the fact that you call it "half as expensive" suggests you have no realistic idea of actual costs. The time you spend searching the parts together is already more expensive than a MacBook.
• codegeek 13y ago
  To be fair to the ad, I think they mean it in a funny way when they say "PC users may have to justify themselves" but even then, it comes off as the usual crap of "if you are a PC/windows user, you are not hipsters like us who are on mac".So the intention might be good but I agree that it probably is not the right place for it. I personally use a dell laptop for dev work at home where I have partitioned windows 7 and Ubuntu and switch to either as necessary.
• etjossem 13y ago
  Agreed. When you say "all the shiny Apple products you want", you actually mean "the fixed cost of your equipment is irrelevant compared to the value you create in the long run." Say so in plain terms. The most attractive type of equipment benefit I've ever seen on a job posting said the following: "Pick whatever will make you most productive: we'll order it overnight." Even if there are one-time integration costs involved in adding a PC user to the team, that candidate may still be more productive in Ubuntu. Trust their judgement.
• spamizbad 13y ago
  Totally agree. Even though I'm a mac user, PC-hostile attitude is a total red flag for me. My experience has been that more Mac-heavy shops tend to be somewhat weaker on the *nix side, primarily because they overlook people with strong Linux chops. If they genuinely know their stuff, PC/Linux people can help you get more mileage out of your infrastructure... which sounds like something 42floors needs at the moment. There was a story of a failed startup on HN a month or so ago that had a co-founder who stated (jokingly) that they'd no-hire engineers who used Linux as their primary OS. They ultimately folded in part because of technical issues with their infrastructure. In that respect, it wouldn't surprise me if there's a real correlation between crummy sysops and PC-hostileness in startups.
  • cheald 13y ago
    > There was a story of a failed startup on HN a month or so ago that had a co-founder who stated (jokingly) that they'd no-hire engineers who used Linux as their primary OS This blows my mind. I'd think that would be a prime quality, since you're almost certainly going to be deploying on Linux platforms. Intimate knowledge of your production platform is invaluable.
  • UK-AL 13y ago
    That's odd. Being familiar with a Mac system would normally make you better with Linux considering the terminal is similar.
    • spamizbad 13y ago
      Keep in mind "PC" in this context would probably indicate Linux just as easily as Windows - these are startup developers we're talking about.
      • UK-AL 13y ago
        That's what I'm saying. Mac users tend to be familiar with linux automatically. I don't think Mac users would be anti-linux.
      • 13y ago
• john_b 13y ago
  I was surprised to not find "unlimited Kool Aid" among the benefits.
• skrebbel 13y ago
  Seconded. I know we're getting a bit off topic here, but I'm growing really tired of all the startups who think making fun of people who prefer a different OS/computer than the founders is a good recruiting strategy. Think about it. If you're a Mac user, would you work for a startup that says " This is a pure .NET shop and proud of it! You won't find any of those Apple hipsters here!"? If not, why do you assume the opposite is somehow very attractive?
  • eridius 13y ago
    If you're a Mac user, why would you even be interested in a pure .NET shop?
    • skrebbel 13y ago
      Sure, the example feels a bit over the top, but if you really can't think of an example, then I dare calling you a little short sighted. It's like saying a Windows user wouldn't want to work at a Node.js shop. What does the dev tech have to do with the OS? And yes, it's a fair comparison, especially since Xamarin.
    • lmm 13y ago
      We're constantly told not all mac users are zealots. If you're a developer who has decided OSX is the best option but isn't religious about it you would probably be willing to work in .net if the rest of that company was good enough.
    • dangrossman 13y ago
      Why don't you ask the folks at StackOverflow? Pure C#.NET/IIS/SQL Server stack, founded by an MBP user.
• saosebastiao 13y ago
  I kid you not...that line literally prevented me from thinking about submitting my resume...despite the fact that I'm completely sold on their business model.
• Evbn 13y ago
  You make a lot of outdated assumptions about Google engineering. And they have basically the same policy: Fancy Macs, but MS Windows is frowned upon.