There are big tech companies which are slowly moving their staff (for web/desktop dev to asic designers to HPC to finance and HR) to VDI, with the only exception being people who need a local GPU. They issue a lightweight laptop with long battery life as a dumb terminal.

The desktop latency has gotten way better over the years and the VMs have enough network bandwidth to do builds on a shared network drive. I've also found it easier to request hardware upgrades for VDIs if I need more vCPUs or memory, and some places let you dispatch jobs to more powerful hosts without loading up your machine.

It's for example being rolled out at my current employer, which is one of the biggest electronic trading companies in the world, mostly C++ software engineers, and research in Python. While many people still run their IDE on the dumb terminal (VSCode has pretty good SSH integration), people that use vim or the like work fully remotely through ssh.

I've also seen it elsewhere in the same industry. I've seen AWS workspaces, custom setups with licensed proprietary or open-source tech, fully dedicated instances or kubernetes pods.. All managed in a variety of ways but the idea remains the same: you log into a remote machine to do all of your work, and can't do anything without a reliable low-latency connection.

With tools like Blaze/Bazel (Google) or Buck2 (Meta) compilations are performed on a massive parallel server farm and the hermetic nature of the builds ensures there are no undocumented dependencies to bite you. These are used for nearly everything at Big Tech, not just webdev.

Worse when the VPN they also force on you adds 300ms.

All of the big clouds have regions throughout the world so you should be able to find one less than 100ms away fairly easily.

Then realistically in any company you'll need to interact with services and data in one specific location, so maybe it's better to be colocated there instead.

I wonder if everyone on HN has just woken from a 20 year coma.