Interveiw: We have a highly motivated team of Perl programmers, though we're large, we still have the start-up mentality. Most of our developers use Linux or Mac.
Reality: As a condition of your employeement, you have to hold your pee all day or else beg a badge off of someone who isn't supposed to give it up, or have them follow you to the bathroom. You won't be given logins to the database systems and if you request one, it'll be an incident that causes the database group to lash out because the undocumented, unknown protocol wasn't respected to the high degree they expect. Your machine isn't allowed on the network, you can't have a company Mac, but we'll let you have Linux, but we have two VPNs and you're going to be working from home. One VPN is the Microsoft VPN, the other one just hates Linux for no reason. So you need to either buy your own Mac or else run Windows.
So, I'm too busy finding a way that I'm permitted to operate in all of the red tape that two weeks have gone by and I still haven't spent any signifcant time reading the code. This makes me look bad and costs me leverage I badly need.
-scott
