My sympathies! Sounds like a nightmare story indeed and I might refuse a company's offer on the basis of having to go through this alone... Although can't deny

My sympathies! Sounds like a nightmare story indeed and I might refuse a company's offer on the basis of having to go through this alone... Although can't deny that for the most of us US salaries are pretty damn appealing. Truthfully, if I was director of IT and security, I'd likely just source all laptops in my department and preinstall everything needed and then ship the machine to the new employee, giving them passwords through a secure channel e.g. Signal / encrypted Telegram chats / PGP'd mail etc. I've worked once on a corporate Linux laptop and it was a nightmare. The machine in particular wasn't very good and was easily overheating and its fans were always spinning, and of course the VPN worker crashed every 3-4h or so -- which still wasn't a big deal for a 8h working day, mind you, but you did have to always be prepared for the next thing you're doing to fail with a mysterious network failure. Again, sympathies. It sounds like a shit show. Another thing I'd consider would just be to ship everyone the same 8GB RAM laptops that all remote into cloud instances. Machine stolen? Tokens / passwords / keys expire every hour anyway even if the IT is asleep at the wheel for that one hour, so who cares.