4 ms·

I find the bit about employees being permitted to use their own computers almost astounding. However small an organization is, it should be insisting on providi

I find the bit about employees being permitted to use their own computers almost astounding. However small an organization is, it should be insisting on providing a company-owned machine and having all company business be conducted on that machine. This has massive benefits to the company in terms of control of corporate IP, huge benefits to the employee in terms of separation of work time and personal time, and it doesn't even cost that much to do.

askonomm 3y ago
From an employers perspective, maybe. From an employee perspective? Yeah I'd much rather use my (much more powerful) machine where I have everything set-up exactly how I like instead. Tons more convenient.
FireBeyond 3y ago
> I find the bit about employees being permitted to use their own computers almost astounding. However small an organization is, it should be insisting on providing a company-owned machine and having all company business be conducted on that machine. I've worked with small and startup healthcare/healthcare-tech companies who not only permit it, but have formal BYOD policies... when they are dealing with PHI.
pas 3y ago
it's GitLab, open source / open core / source available, MRs in the open, etc. there's basically zero difference between internal/external contributors. (unless the employee was working on some embargoed/security/backoffice/infra stuff)
hnarn 3y ago
Not to mention the inability to enforce full disk encryption and (hopefully) avoid leakage when someone quits. It’s obviously not a silver bullet but at least then leakage must be hostile action or incompetence by transferring sensitive data outside of authorized channels.
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  > the inability to enforce full disk encryption Here's what my previous company did: “please jump on a videoconference call, now please share your screen, and go to the disk encryption settings to show me it's enabled, thank you” You get the same benefit as with stronger enforcement since as you said disk encryption won't protect you from hostile actions anyway.
  - hnarn 3y ago
    > You get the same benefit I strongly disagree, because if the employee isn’t handing in their device when they exit that data is still out there. As I said, this is not a silver bullet, but for the data to still “be out there” the employee must at some point transfer the data out of the company device, which should be a policy violation. Also, I honestly personally think a company not providing hardware is a huge red flag, I’ve never encountered it in 15 years (but maybe it’s less common in Europe, I don’t know).
    - littlestymaar 3y ago
      Unless your company provide automatic backup management with straightforward recovery for your employees (which I've never seen, including at customers), your most cautious employees will backup their device in order not to lose their work, and then there's always data “somewhere out there”. Again, the way you deal with employees having company's IP remaining on their computer is to set up a call and ask them to remove it. Good faith employees will do it, bad faith ones would have copied it on their drive before handing out the computer in the first place.
      - hnarn 3y ago
        > Unless your company provide automatic backup management with straightforward recovery for your employees You make this sound like some kind of pipe dream. I don't know what companies you've been at, but for a lot of large corporations today it's completely normal to store all your data in the cloud, from documents at O365 to bespoke SaaS services like gitlab or book-keeping or whatever -- and the ones that don't do it for whatever reasons usually do something very similar, just internally via self-hosting. If every single employee needs to back up their unique snowflake workstation, then something is fundamentally wrong with how data is handled in the first place. > your most cautious employees will backup their device in order not to lose their work The reason employees do this in the first place is because they don't trust the company to ensure the data doesn't disappear. That's the problem right there. I've seen it many times and it's always in chaotic companies filled with shadow IT, which of course are the most vulnerable companies for the same reason.
4hg4ufxhy 3y ago
All popular operating systems support multiple users. There is no worklife balance benefit whatsoever for the user to require a separate machine. It is only inconvienient.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Until your employee walks out the door with a clone of your company private repository on their hardware. Good luck untangling the legal mess.
  - askonomm 3y ago
    And using a company computer somehow prevents me from doing that? Most spyware that they force upon you doesn't seem to, in any way, prevent me from just uploading a zip file to wherever I want.
  - Aeolun 3y ago
    I have a few 10-15 year old repositories backed up somewhere, but surprise surprise, nobody (including myself) cares. It’s theoretically possible for someone to do something bad with them, but it’s just not realistic for 99.999% of the population. I guess it becomes an issue when you have 100k employees.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      I would care. 10-15 year old is probably no longer an issue but technically they're a liability and if they were much younger (which at some point they were) they would be a much larger liability as well as an issue if you ever went to work for a competitor and this came to light (like it just did...). It's not to your advantage to have copies of your former employer's IP and possibly even data laying around. Hostile audits are a thing too, again, on 10 to 15 year old code probably not because that code either has changed considerably or it may have been abandoned.
    - xorcist 3y ago
      That is still clearly intellectual property after 15 years. There could be trade secrets in there. And the slightest suspicion of which is a good reason to sue you, should anyone every need a reason to. It could be an personal conflict spun out of control or an incompetent manager needing someone to blame for a failed business or whatever. If there are any customer data or logs in there, then you could be personally liable under data protection laws. They might not even have an expire date, depending on what kind of data it is. Better safe than sorry, unless you think you have something to gain from keeping that data around.
hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
Semi-related, I would recommend to anyone who is a Linux native to try to find some kind of "minimum viable setup" that is really really easy for you to run out of VirtualBox or Parallels or something for this reason. No matter where you go, you know you can have a suite of tools which work just as you want them to there. Being able to tear it down and rebuild it quickly is also a great way to deal with debugging certain kinds of problems of the "it runs/doesn't run on my machine" category. How you do this is of course up to you. At one end of the spectrum is just relying on your memory. At the other end is using NixOS https://nixos.org/ https://nixos.org/ to get fully reproducible builds anywhere you go. Between these are a vast field of options. I know a guy who maintains an Ansible file set to `host: localhost` which installs everything he wants from that file. For me, I just stick with the latest Ubuntu version and maintain a few shell scripts [1] that install 80% of what I like to have on a new install. If you like the scientific approach, you can install something like https://atuin.sh/ https://atuin.sh/ and do some statistics on what programs you actually run most frequently based on your long term shell history. [1]: https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/shell-bling-ubuntu https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/shell-bling-ubuntu
littlestymaar 3y ago
Giving the choice is what benefits the employees more: sure if you want more separation that's nice to have the option, but I prefer by far use my own computer when I'm WFH because it's a beefy desktop. In any case being forced to use a company mandated operating system is a nuisance for productivity… (be it Windows, where productivity is just bad, or MacOs where I need to relearn everything starting from the most basic key bindings …). Also, companies have no control over corporate IP that land on an employee-controlled PC anyway.
Aeolun 3y ago
Honestly, the company will never care as much about my machine as I do. It’s always an uphill battle to get anything more than whatever they think the default spec should be, so I’d consider it a feature if I could use my own machine.
pbasista 3y ago
> huge benefits to the employee in terms of separation of work time and personal time While I agree that separate work and personal computers might help in this regard, in my opinion it only helps a little. I believe that behavior related to separating work time and personal time is influenced primarily by one's own habits, abilities and, in the end, decisions.
kevin_nisbet 3y ago
I'm not a lawyer so take the comment with a grain of salt, but employee's should likely insist on using company devices as well. If the company were to be sued it may open up the personal devices to all sorts of subpoena for the contents of the device.

askonomm 3y ago

From an employers perspective, maybe. From an employee perspective? Yeah I'd much rather use my (much more powerful) machine where I have everything set-up exactly how I like instead. Tons more convenient.

FireBeyond 3y ago

> I find the bit about employees being permitted to use their own computers almost astounding. However small an organization is, it should be insisting on providing a company-owned machine and having all company business be conducted on that machine. I've worked with small and startup healthcare/healthcare-tech companies who not only permit it, but have formal BYOD policies... when they are dealing with PHI.

pas 3y ago

it's GitLab, open source / open core / source available, MRs in the open, etc. there's basically zero difference between internal/external contributors. (unless the employee was working on some embargoed/security/backoffice/infra stuff)

hnarn 3y ago

Not to mention the inability to enforce full disk encryption and (hopefully) avoid leakage when someone quits. It’s obviously not a silver bullet but at least then leakage must be hostile action or incompetence by transferring sensitive data outside of authorized channels.

littlestymaar 3y ago
> the inability to enforce full disk encryption Here's what my previous company did: “please jump on a videoconference call, now please share your screen, and go to the disk encryption settings to show me it's enabled, thank you” You get the same benefit as with stronger enforcement since as you said disk encryption won't protect you from hostile actions anyway.
- hnarn 3y ago
  > You get the same benefit I strongly disagree, because if the employee isn’t handing in their device when they exit that data is still out there. As I said, this is not a silver bullet, but for the data to still “be out there” the employee must at some point transfer the data out of the company device, which should be a policy violation. Also, I honestly personally think a company not providing hardware is a huge red flag, I’ve never encountered it in 15 years (but maybe it’s less common in Europe, I don’t know).
  - littlestymaar 3y ago
    Unless your company provide automatic backup management with straightforward recovery for your employees (which I've never seen, including at customers), your most cautious employees will backup their device in order not to lose their work, and then there's always data “somewhere out there”. Again, the way you deal with employees having company's IP remaining on their computer is to set up a call and ask them to remove it. Good faith employees will do it, bad faith ones would have copied it on their drive before handing out the computer in the first place.
    - hnarn 3y ago
      > Unless your company provide automatic backup management with straightforward recovery for your employees You make this sound like some kind of pipe dream. I don't know what companies you've been at, but for a lot of large corporations today it's completely normal to store all your data in the cloud, from documents at O365 to bespoke SaaS services like gitlab or book-keeping or whatever -- and the ones that don't do it for whatever reasons usually do something very similar, just internally via self-hosting. If every single employee needs to back up their unique snowflake workstation, then something is fundamentally wrong with how data is handled in the first place. > your most cautious employees will backup their device in order not to lose their work The reason employees do this in the first place is because they don't trust the company to ensure the data doesn't disappear. That's the problem right there. I've seen it many times and it's always in chaotic companies filled with shadow IT, which of course are the most vulnerable companies for the same reason.

4hg4ufxhy 3y ago

All popular operating systems support multiple users. There is no worklife balance benefit whatsoever for the user to require a separate machine. It is only inconvienient.

jacquesm 3y ago
Until your employee walks out the door with a clone of your company private repository on their hardware. Good luck untangling the legal mess.
- askonomm 3y ago
  And using a company computer somehow prevents me from doing that? Most spyware that they force upon you doesn't seem to, in any way, prevent me from just uploading a zip file to wherever I want.
- Aeolun 3y ago
  I have a few 10-15 year old repositories backed up somewhere, but surprise surprise, nobody (including myself) cares. It’s theoretically possible for someone to do something bad with them, but it’s just not realistic for 99.999% of the population. I guess it becomes an issue when you have 100k employees.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    I would care. 10-15 year old is probably no longer an issue but technically they're a liability and if they were much younger (which at some point they were) they would be a much larger liability as well as an issue if you ever went to work for a competitor and this came to light (like it just did...). It's not to your advantage to have copies of your former employer's IP and possibly even data laying around. Hostile audits are a thing too, again, on 10 to 15 year old code probably not because that code either has changed considerably or it may have been abandoned.
  - xorcist 3y ago
    That is still clearly intellectual property after 15 years. There could be trade secrets in there. And the slightest suspicion of which is a good reason to sue you, should anyone every need a reason to. It could be an personal conflict spun out of control or an incompetent manager needing someone to blame for a failed business or whatever. If there are any customer data or logs in there, then you could be personally liable under data protection laws. They might not even have an expire date, depending on what kind of data it is. Better safe than sorry, unless you think you have something to gain from keeping that data around.

hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago

Semi-related, I would recommend to anyone who is a Linux native to try to find some kind of "minimum viable setup" that is really really easy for you to run out of VirtualBox or Parallels or something for this reason. No matter where you go, you know you can have a suite of tools which work just as you want them to there. Being able to tear it down and rebuild it quickly is also a great way to deal with debugging certain kinds of problems of the "it runs/doesn't run on my machine" category. How you do this is of course up to you. At one end of the spectrum is just relying on your memory. At the other end is using NixOS https://nixos.org/ https://nixos.org/ to get fully reproducible builds anywhere you go. Between these are a vast field of options. I know a guy who maintains an Ansible file set to `host: localhost` which installs everything he wants from that file. For me, I just stick with the latest Ubuntu version and maintain a few shell scripts [1] that install 80% of what I like to have on a new install. If you like the scientific approach, you can install something like https://atuin.sh/ https://atuin.sh/ and do some statistics on what programs you actually run most frequently based on your long term shell history. [1]: https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/shell-bling-ubuntu https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/shell-bling-ubuntu

littlestymaar 3y ago

Giving the choice is what benefits the employees more: sure if you want more separation that's nice to have the option, but I prefer by far use my own computer when I'm WFH because it's a beefy desktop. In any case being forced to use a company mandated operating system is a nuisance for productivity… (be it Windows, where productivity is just bad, or MacOs where I need to relearn everything starting from the most basic key bindings …). Also, companies have no control over corporate IP that land on an employee-controlled PC anyway.

Aeolun 3y ago

Honestly, the company will never care as much about my machine as I do. It’s always an uphill battle to get anything more than whatever they think the default spec should be, so I’d consider it a feature if I could use my own machine.

pbasista 3y ago

> huge benefits to the employee in terms of separation of work time and personal time While I agree that separate work and personal computers might help in this regard, in my opinion it only helps a little. I believe that behavior related to separating work time and personal time is influenced primarily by one's own habits, abilities and, in the end, decisions.

kevin_nisbet 3y ago

I'm not a lawyer so take the comment with a grain of salt, but employee's should likely insist on using company devices as well. If the company were to be sued it may open up the personal devices to all sorts of subpoena for the contents of the device.