Sumo Logic Blog

In the last few years, many developers started to favor Mac OS X as a development platform. When you come work for Sumo Logic, we give you a top-of-the line MacBook Pro, and you get to keep it, for good. This post describes the terms of this offer and the rationale behind it.

Why MacBooks?

Both founders of Sumo Logic are Mac OS X users. Naturally, their influence has made OS X our default choice. Most developers are quite happy with their Macs, though a few have chosen Windows or Linux machines — the same rules apply to all. Many people who joined Sumo Logic came from Windows and gave Macs a try. Most of them love it. The well-known advantage of OS X is that it’s a Unix, but with a great UI built on top. 

Why top of the line?

We want everybody here to be as productive as possible. There’s nothing more wasteful than a developer sitting in front of their machine twiddling their thumbs while their hard drive churns through a compile for minutes. Over a year, this adds up to hours.

To avoid this, we give developers a decked-out MacBook Pro. We used to get the 17” model until they discontinued it, now we selected the Retina 15” MacBook Pro. We max out memory, get a good size SSD and the fastest (affordable) CPU.

Why do you get to keep it?

Portable computers get loved, abused, dragged through meetings, dropped, travelled with, etc. Even for very well-built machines (such as those made from a single block of aluminum), there is wear and tear after a while. Because we’ve seen dinged corners, loose screen hinges, scratched screens, and kid scribbles, we decided that once a laptop has been with you for two years, we won’t reassign it. Instead, you keep the laptop.

If you upgrade to a newer machine – great, now you have two. If you want to repurpose it for a someone in your family - great, we’ll simply wipe the data off it and reinstall the OS for you. If you (god forbid) leave the company – same thing, wipe the thing and reinstall the OS, you have a laptop to keep and use.

With this perk we bet you’ll take good care of your hardware.

So I get a new machine every two years?

Not exactly. You’ll get a new machine when it makes sense (when the productivity benefits of a new computer make it worthwhile). The expectation is for that to happen about every 3 years.