You may be able to download ripgrep, and execute it (!), but god forbid you can create an alias in your shell in a persistant manner.
Really? "most" even? What CAN you do if you can't edit files in your own $HOME?
Most corporate machines are Windows boxes with ps and cmd.exe heavily restricted, no admin, and anti malware software surveilling I/O like a hawk.
You might get a git bash if you are lucky, but it's usually so slow it's completely unusable.
In one client I once tried to sneak in Clink. Flagged instantly by security and reported to HR.
It's easy to forget that life outside the HN bubble is still stuck there.
We are not talking about exceptions either. This is pretty standard stuff when you work outside of the IT-literate companies.
At one client, they provided me with a part time tester, they neglected to give him the permissions to install git. Took 3 weeks to fix.
The same client makes us dev on Windows machine but deploy on Linux pods. We can't directly test on the linux, nor connect to them, only deploy on it. In fact, we don't even have the specs of the pods, I had to create a whole API endpoint in the project just to be able to fetch them.
Other things I got to enjoy:
- CTO storing the passwords of all the servers in an libre office file
- lead testing in prod, as root, by copying files through ftp. No version control.
- sysadmin that had an interesting way of managing his servers: he remote controlled one particular windows machine using team viewer which ones the only one that could connect through ssh to them.
The list is quite long.
This makes you see the entire world with a whole new perspective.
I always thought that all devs should spend a year doing tech support for a variety of companies so that they get a reality check on what most humans actually have to deal with when working on a computer.
If you are on HN, you are the 1%.
