Why I'll always help a competitor (and why that's not weird)

November 06, 2025 • 1020 words • 5 min read

🏷️ community company culture values

I got a DM this week that made me pause. Someone in Mac Admins Slack was surprised I’d helped Rich Trouton troubleshoot an issue. “Doesn’t he work for Jamf?” they asked. “Aren’t they your competitor?”

Yes. And yes.

Rich was seeing weird behavior with virtual machines running macOS 26.1.0—they weren’t reporting serial numbers. I jumped in to reproduce it because that’s what you do when someone’s stuck. I spun up a test VM, confirmed I was seeing the same thing, and let him know. That was it. I didn’t solve his problem, just verified he wasn’t going crazy.

Here’s what that person maybe didn’t know: Rich and I go way back. Long before I worked for Fleet. Long before he worked for Jamf. When we lived closer together, we used to meet halfway for lunch once a month. We’ve presented at conferences together. We’ve helped each other through tough problems and tougher days.

The fact that our paychecks come from competing companies now? That changes nothing.

Friends across the aisle

I have friends at most of my employer’s competitors. Not just acquaintances. Friends. People I’ve known for years, some over a decade. People I respect deeply. People who’ve helped me more times than I can count.

When I see them struggling with a problem, I don’t think “competitor.” I think “friend needs help.” The response is automatic. It’s not strategic. It’s not calculated. It’s just what we do.

And they do the same for me. Always have.

This isn’t unique to me. Look around the Mac Admins Slack on any given day. You’ll see someone from Jamf helping someone from Kandji. Someone from Mosyle helping someone from Fleet. Someone from Addigy jumping in with a solution for anyone who needs it. We don’t check employment history before offering help.

That’s the foundation this community was built on.

Small world, big problems

The Mac Admin community started because it had to. Our corner of IT was tiny. Niche. Most enterprise IT was Windows-focused, and Mac-specific knowledge was hard to come by. Official documentation was sparse. Vendor support was hit-or-miss. If you wanted to figure out how to deploy Macs at scale, your best resource was finding other people trying to do the same thing.

We needed each other. Not for networking or career advancement. For survival.

You couldn’t Google your way out of most problems because nobody had written about them yet. You couldn’t open a support ticket because half the vendors didn’t take Macs seriously. Your only option was finding other Mac Admins and figuring it out together.

That necessity created something special. A community that genuinely cared about helping each other succeed. Because if we didn’t help each other, nobody else was going to.

The tipping point

I entered this world right when things were shifting. Macs were starting to be taken seriously as business machines. The iPhone and iPad created momentum that made ignoring Apple impossible. Companies that had been pure Windows shops suddenly needed someone who could manage Macs.

We were at a tipping point. The community could have fractured as it grew. Competition between vendors could have created division. Commercial interests could have poisoned the collaborative spirit.

Instead, we doubled down on what made us strong in the first place: helping each other.

What we built

Today, Mac Admins Slack has over 80,000 members. There are conferences dedicated to Mac administration across multiple continents. There are podcasts, YouTube channels, blogs, and countless other resources. The ecosystem I entered almost 20 years ago would be unrecognizable to someone from that era.

But here’s the remarkable thing: despite all that growth, despite the commercial interests, despite the competition between vendors, the core principle hasn’t changed.

Mac Admins help Mac Admins.

You can work for competing companies and still genuinely want to see each other succeed. You can have different technical approaches and still respect each other’s expertise. You can disagree about the best solution and still troubleshoot together when things break.

That’s just how it works here.

Why this matters

In a lot of industries, this would be weird. You’d be expected to be guarded around competitors. Protective of information. Strategic about every interaction.

We don’t do that. We share our configs. We publish our runbooks. We document our processes and post them publicly. We help each other debug issues that might make our employer’s product look bad.

And somehow, this doesn’t hurt us. It makes us all better.

When I help someone at a competitor solve a problem, I learn something too. When they help me, I become more effective at my job. A rising tide lifts all boats. Our customers benefit because we’re all getting smarter together.

But more than that, it keeps us human. It reminds us that behind every company name is a person trying to do good work. Someone who gets frustrated by the same bugs. Someone who celebrates the same victories. Someone who understands what it’s like to be on call when everything breaks at 2am.

We’re not abstractions. We’re not just representing our employers. We’re people who happen to work in the same weird, wonderful corner of IT.

Looking forward

The Mac Admin community isn’t perfect. We have work to do on making our spaces more welcoming and inclusive. We need to keep building on-ramps for new people entering the field. We should be more intentional about elevating diverse voices and perspectives.

But the collaborative foundation? That’s worth protecting. That spirit of genuine mutual support across company boundaries? That’s rare and valuable.

So yeah, I’ll keep helping people who work for competitors. I’ll keep sharing what I learn, even when it might benefit a competing product. I’ll keep showing up for my friends, regardless of what logo is on their LinkedIn profile.

Not because it’s strategic. Because it’s what we do. Because that’s what this community has always been about.

And when Rich Trouton needs help reproducing a weird VM serial number bug, I’m going to spin up that VM and let him know what I see. Every single time.

That’s what Mac Admins do.