Why All Your Engineers Should Get a Laptop
At the first day in MyRoll I was exiting- it was my first day in a startup, I was the first employee in the company and we all were thrilled to get started the new adventure.
But you know you don’t really on board until you get your new MacBook Pro.
In the past 3 years I’m pretty sure I’ve been seeing my Mac more than my wife. It was there when we hacked all night, on conferences and talks I gave and more.
A few months ago, the startup I was working for got acquired and I began my corporate life, as part of the move we left our old Macs behind and got the new super fast PCs. I’m really far from being a Windows fan, and I really liked the concept of working wherever you want, so I immediately raised my voice about this (some are getting laptops, but the default is PC).
I was told that I can get a laptop, but they asked me one single question- “Why? Why do you really need a laptop?”. I didn't actually had an answer, this is just the way it is, developers are working on Mac, this is how it goes, just go to the next DroidCon close to you home and look at the audience.
The only reason I had is that I might want working from home and their answer was “We don’t want you to work from home- we want you to be with your family when you’re home, leave work at work”, they were right, my work-life balance is much better since I got here.
So do I really need a Mac? Is it possible that this is just a useless trend that everyone following seamlessly? I thought about that in the following 3 months since I got here and came up with few points points:
Hands down the most important thing here (in my opinion) is the ability to easily go and seat with your college- if it’s for one helping each other with bug in code, or easy integration for your APIs or even show a demo for your designers. Because this is a big company and you probably working with people that are in a different room (or floor), it is sometimes reduce the feedback loop dramatic and solve a lot miscommunication.
Work remotely- or at least give the option for people sometimes work from remote, read the great post from stack overflow team on why they believe its so good, in short- it helps to increase productivity, and more hiring options.
You need to encourage your employees to go out there and participate in conferences, if as a member for leaning new things, or even better- show and talk about their work as a speaker. You also want it to be as easier as possible, if someone talk about new library- it’s better try it on the project right now. If it some cool tool he or she developed- you want to show it easily, without setup it in a new computer.
Hackatons are great, I really enjoy the sense of responsibility of deliver a product in 24 hours, even if it’s just an app that block your smartphone outgoing communication when you’re drunk (I’ll call it “XGuard”). Bringing a PC to an hackaton will just waste you an hour for setup and will make you look as noob.
Healthier and refreshing work environment- sitting next to a desk is killing you, go and stand in front of the window, see the amazing world outside, go work in the sun and refresh your head.
As a boss, you want you workers will be familiar with the bleeding edge technologies out there, that kind of people usually will be the ones that will drive your team for a better and newer tools, so why not encourage them and give them a laptop so they will be able to learn Kotlin in the late night?
So that it, I now about to share this post with our VP of R&D and hope for good =)
Disclaimers:
In a lot of places there isn’t really a problem to get a laptop, but the problem is the default- because 90% of the people will go with the default.
When referring to Mac I intend to unix based operation system laptop, because I think that developers should be familiar with terminal and shell scripting for couple of reason (that’s for another post). I just think that Mac is best out there…