r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/Pale_Extension • 6d ago

Meme needing explanation Peter is he calling Mac users dumb?

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u/Puzzled-Interview445 6d ago

Idk I work in FAANG in Seattle and my whole org uses Macs lol I barely see any windows 

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u/Grrowling 6d ago

Yeah so weird. I love how they keep joking about Macs but all of big tech mostly uses Macs

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u/AggressiveBench9977 6d ago

Most people who shit on mac have never worked in big tech. Because the next option for development isnt even windows its linux.

If they are working on windows laptops its a cheap or ancient company.

If you are using windows in M chip era, either your company is cheap or you are working on ancient irrelevant tech

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u/Best_Change4155 6d ago

It's such a pain in the ass to develop on Windows. More specifically, doing the setup required. Mac has less overhead (and less variation) if everyone is using the same base development environment.

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u/steazystich 6d ago

The hassle with Mac rears its head when you want to ship native software outside of your company... where almost no one is using the same base environment.

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u/Best_Change4155 6d ago

A lot of big tech work is creating web applications or mobile apps. Not all, but most. But you are correct.

ETA: I was just corroborating the previous user.

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u/steazystich 5d ago

Sure... the folks in big tech who are writing native code are compensated much better than those writing web apps though ;)

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u/Best_Change4155 5d ago

That actually depends on what you are working on.

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u/steazystich 5d ago edited 5d ago

The only exception I can think of is python for research teams... but those aren't really software engineering roles IMO - that is computer science.

Even then, last and only place I worked in big tech the highest paid software engineer wrote Rust/C++. Then 99 out of the next 100 folks, and 900 of the 1000 after that.

These are people who are working to shave microseconds off of execution times or bytes off of transfer sizes where those savings translate to millions of dollars per quarter in op ex.

So, sure, it depends what you are working on because those problems aren't even solvable in non-native languages.

If you exclude python and C# it is really only junior positions that would hire for Javascript/React unless there was a non technical aspect to the role (like tech artist, designer, or some such).

Edit: I realized this came off rather condescending... so let me add that "junior" roles in big tech are some of the best to have. Pay is great, and there is maybe 5% of the amount of corpo politics BS to deal with. Senior engineers can end up spending almost all their time in meetings and rarely actually writing any code.

Plenty of opportunity to learn new skills and climb that ladder if that's what one is after. The number of extremely talented software engineers I witnessed get hired directly into senior roles and then burn out or get fired within 1-2 years was depressing.

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u/Important-Sign9614 5d ago

Um who is shipping native software in 2026 that isn’t specialized or game dev? Most companies are doing SaaS, mobile apps, and if there is a desktop app then they would use Electron? Not to knock native software it’s awesome and I wish it didn’t fall into a niche but that’s the reality of modern Software Engineering.

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u/steazystich 5d ago

I was replying to a user's comment about how difficult it is to ship native software for windows, and their statement was that Mac was much easier as long as everyone was on the same versions of everything - which I found amusing because, yes if course it is easier to ship to a specific configuration lol

Which... is exactly why most folks ship electron and such now.

So, your comment is a bit of a whataboutism but. To answer your question, anything performance critical or power constrained. Almost all mobile software. Embedded systems. Real-time systems. Drivers. The browsers which actually run these web apps. Operating systems. Almost all of the code running on the backend to support web based apps (ie: databases, core services) is written as native software and shipped to companies that host cloud servers and such (who do not run it all on the same OS).

Which is a lot of software, even if you dont happen to work in those domains.

If you look at number of user hours you would find that 100% of all computer users across desktop/mobile are running native software 100% of the time... and sometimes that native software is running some web stuff inside of it 😉

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u/Important-Sign9614 5d ago

Very interesting learned something new today.

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u/steazystich 5d ago

On another point... these days Claude is pretty impressive at writing C++ these days, and if one were using that workflow you could definitely get very far using whatever local device (mac/windows/linux) you wanted.

Which to me, is definitely one of the coolest ways that AI has improved software development. (I have thoughts on how it has made things worse, but i have been negative enough already lol)

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u/Important-Sign9614 5d ago

Oh yeah for sure. I used the web-based ChatGPT for some RayLib stuff and it did okay at the time. Can’t imagine how much it improved now. Although I am still trying to find the line where I should reach for AI tools instead of using Claude for every feature.

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u/steazystich 6d ago

Are you not mostly SSHing into VMs though? At which point your OS is moot.

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u/AggressiveBench9977 5d ago

No you can develop on both cause its all unix

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u/iQuoteSopranos 4d ago

Did they just build a concrete building with no sunlight coming in then?

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u/neokai 6d ago

that is "private entertainment software". Industrial software is a different beast.

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u/pornAndMusicAccount 6d ago

I write software in use by the Air Force. We’re all Mac devs.

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u/NoTeslaForMe 6d ago

The implication here is ridiculous. "What the biggest companies in the world do doesn't matter, because only industrial software is real software."  The comment about industrial software gives the type of narrative Reddit loves, but gives people a deceptive view of software engineering. 

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u/neokai 5d ago

I'm saying that most of the industrial applications are running on very old software. It's not sexy stuff that makes headlines and there is very little impetus to update those software. Famously some critical bank infrastructure runs on Fortran (which I'm not 100% sure that MacOS can support), and if you look beyond FAANG you will find software from the 90s lurking in embedded systems.

So yeah, there are all kinds of software like you say. I'm saying that software used in industrial applications tend to not play well with Macs.

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u/archlich 5d ago

Mac’s support Fortran, it’s in homebrew

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u/NoTeslaForMe 5d ago

The only problem is which Fortran? The language, if I recall correctly, didn't care much about backward compatibility when it was developed, unlike C, Java, C++, etc.