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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 inc

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.
acdha 3y ago
Some things to consider: 1. What happens when you have a legal dispute and all of your personal data is now caught up in the legal discovery process? Repeat for layoffs, etc. where you have no warning to make backups in advance. Don’t forget to think about what happens if you look for another job and your record of that is on their system. 2. How painful will the conversation be when someone’s personal activity leads to them getting malware, and now you have to treat that as a company breach, rotate everything they have access to, contact every user whose PII was in test data or bug reports, etc.? 3. Say you work on something on your spare time, but some suit insists that it’s company property since it was developed on company equipment. How much fun will it be arguing that you only worked in your spare time? 4. Where is the convenience, really? It’s probably not actually the case that you are getting paid to swap interchangeably between work and home, or that you work on the exact same things (if so, good luck convincing the lawyers that they don’t own your work), so you’re probably using that convenience to contribute unpaid overtime to your employer. Having a hard boundary between those is usually mutually beneficial.

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.

acdha 3y ago

Some things to consider: 1. What happens when you have a legal dispute and all of your personal data is now caught up in the legal discovery process? Repeat for layoffs, etc. where you have no warning to make backups in advance. Don’t forget to think about what happens if you look for another job and your record of that is on their system. 2. How painful will the conversation be when someone’s personal activity leads to them getting malware, and now you have to treat that as a company breach, rotate everything they have access to, contact every user whose PII was in test data or bug reports, etc.? 3. Say you work on something on your spare time, but some suit insists that it’s company property since it was developed on company equipment. How much fun will it be arguing that you only worked in your spare time? 4. Where is the convenience, really? It’s probably not actually the case that you are getting paid to swap interchangeably between work and home, or that you work on the exact same things (if so, good luck convincing the lawyers that they don’t own your work), so you’re probably using that convenience to contribute unpaid overtime to your employer. Having a hard boundary between those is usually mutually beneficial.