authenticity

Maybe I've become a corporate shill, but I've started to appreciate company values and missions statements. Especially when the company seems to actually give a shit about them. My current company makes a bid deal about their corporate values and, for the most part, they actually seem to live up to them.

One of the ones that I originally wrote off was that of "authenticity". I've since learned that it empowers me to be whoever I want to be and trust that my company will have my back. We're a very inclusive, accepting, and supportive group of people. I like that. It let's me "nerd out" on stuff and not fear that my peers will think I'm eccentric.

However, there is one minor thing that has come up that goes against embracing that authenticity. We recently acquired a company that built a vSCode plugin. Since the acquisition, we've extended this plugin to support our core offering. Initially they suggested that everyone give it a try, but many of us declined because we either didn't use VSCode or didn't want to use the plugin. Not that anyone needs to defend their position, but the plugin does include some unnecessary telemetry and closed-source bloat.

Last week I got word that many of the engineers in the organization were told that this plugin was no longer considered optional and that we needed to use it. Some of the reasoning was that other big tech companies used their own software, so we should too. It misses several points. I don't want to work at a company that tells me what tools I need to use. I don't want to measure myself against a Google engineer. If I was going to do that, I'd get a job a Google.

It's also not embracing authenticity. I've been using vim for well over a decade. It's what I'm using to write this log. In many ways, it's how I define myself as a coder. I don't want to use VSCode. It's bloated and slow, is made by Microsoft, and isn't as tailored as my setup. I know there's a vim plugin (I've contributed to it in the past) but it's not the same thing.

I've decided to hold firm in my decision to stick with my editor. Out of curiosity, I'm starting to explore a port of the plugin for vim.

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