What if your laptop is broken? You should be restricted from getting a job? What about if you just landed in the US and didn't want to have to present it to the authorities to scan and plan on buying a new one because they are cheaper there. What about if a family member was currently using it. There are plenty of valid reasons why you might not have a laptop in general or at the moment in your life.
Then you should find a way around it. If an applicant can't even manage to get a laptop for a few hours I rather hire someone else.
In extreme cases we can work it out but you should have something that makes up for the extra annoyance compared to 99% of applicants.
In most work places you are provided a computer to work on. So you could very easily not have a personal computer during your career as you are always provided one to work on.
Probably not common, but certainly plausible. Not everyone wants to bring work home or have hobbies that are the same as their work.
I wouldn't want to hire someone who literally never uses a computer outside work (to the point of not owning one).
I’m a lead engineer and have been Staff plus for more than 5 years. I’ve actually personally run into this problem (not having a working laptop for an interview). I don’t really do laptops well because it’s not a good environment to get work done in. I can see a large screen(s) desktop setup better and prefer that.
> I can see a large screen(s) desktop setup better and prefer that.
I kinda assumed that most developers took a similar approach to me. Laptop because portable when you need it, hooked to large screens, nice keyboard, nice mouse/whatever. I don't know what having a desktop would really buy me. I do 99% of my work with the laptop docked but that remaining 1% it sure is handy to grab it and go.
Desktop gives you a ton more oomph when you need it. Not that it is affordable today, but my personal desktop has 192GB of RAM, 24TB HDD, beefy GPU, and is basically never going to thermal throttle.
If you are just making web apps, it does not matter, but I do data processing where having the headroom can make a big difference.
I do have the cheapest used laptop I could find for those moments when I might require portability.
That’s a fair point. The most I use my laptop for is some local LLM processing. I’d have more headroom on a desktop, for sure, but 96GB M2 max has plenty of oomph for my needs. Maybe I’m underestimating how many power users there are. For my day job I tend to offload most of my work onto a big server anyway so I could probably get by with a Neo at this point.
I priced one out for my current job and honestly the savings just weren’t there. The ram, gpu, HD now take up a disproportionate share of the price.
I’m keeping applecare on my macbook paid up and planning to hunker down for a few years hoping prices relax a little.
Yes, that's me too and why I mentioned it. Often it feels like I'm alone in that many of my peer developers have sweet gaming rigs with beaucoup RAM while I'm just chugging along with a laptop.
In one instance for a data-oriented job interview I spun up a VM in the cloud because they linked a kaggle dataset for the at home test that was just a bit too big for my laptop to handle.
But to have nothing, no desktop, no laptop at all, is _odd_ for a developer. How did you get through school? If not school, then how is it a hobby-turned-profession without something to develop on?
The whole "no one should be denied access to a job" angle is weird too. What is the limit to accommodations?
American jobs more or less assume you have a car, given the lack of public transport. You could borrow a car but also borrow a laptop? Dunno, it's not a bad thought to reconsider some assumptions.
I used laptop because that's what the parent said, but I really meant a computer of any kind at home. I assumed a remote interview. If its an interview in person at an office I'd definitely expect hardware to be provided.
the mention of laptop was not adding a laptop requirement to the original question
Wow your suggestion is “let them eat cake?”
Do you actually believe what you’re saying, or have you not thought it through?
What reality are you living in?
there are people out there who don't want to hold your hand.
stop advocating that we discriminate against them because you feel you need your hand held.
If a candidate reached out claiming they didn’t have a machine to interview with, I’d gladly find another path forward. But I imagine that’s a small minority in this industry.
It wouldn’t stop them from being hired.
Any obstacle whatsoever, especially one you yourself admit is very rare, is much more likely to result in a dropped interview if one is even offered. Why bother?
You’ve got 10,000 candidates applying. Seriously, what would make “doesn’t have a laptop” stand out to you positively? Why not just go with the 9800 applicants who do have one? Surely there’s no reason to think “broken laptop = good dev”. It’s so much easier to simply go with a candidate who has no problems. Beyond that, what’s the deal with making candidates do stuff on their own machines anyways? You don’t know what’s on there. You don’t even know if it’s stable enough for a test, and none of that has any bearing at all on their skill.
I’ve never worked in the Bay Area, but if this is common practice, I think I dodged a bullet.