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Almost everybody here is going to say to not do it but I’ll go the other way. You only live once and you want to do it, so why not? Because there might be som

Almost everybody here is going to say to not do it but I’ll go the other way. You only live once and you want to do it, so why not? Because there might be some malware that’ll screw things up? Unlikely on a Mac. Because there might be a lawsuit where your personal computer ends up as evidence? Almost certainly not going to happen. Be cause it’s good evidence for a vindictive boss to use to fire you? Yeah whatever if somebody wants to fire you they’re going to do it anyway. If you can accept that this is a weird thing to do and might have some risk associated with it, go nuts.

jdswain 2y ago
I liked this comment because it said what I was basically thinking. In my last job I kept everything seperate, a lot of people didn't and when we all got made redundant, I just closed my work laptop and walked away, some of the others were scrambling to disentangle everything and had all sorts of problems. But in my new job I'm doing work on my personal laptop. It started because, I travel by plane to work regularly. I was carrying three laptops, my personal one, my work one, and one provided by my current client. It was just so much easier to combine everything into one laptop and just carry that. It's working out really well. Before I was constantly moving from one laptop to another just to check messages. I think doing work on your personal computer is less bad than having personal stuff on your work computer, I wouldn't do that.
DrammBA 2y ago
People can be very judgemental here but I've done it for the past 15 years. I only use the work laptop to access stuff I know IT is logging, so they see the correct device with the correct serial making the connection, otherwise personal laptop for everything. I also use separate browsers (chrome for work, firefox for personal stuff) cause I'm not a psycho. Also I see people are conflating the use of a work laptop for personal stuff with using your personal laptop for work, those are very different and people doing personal stuff on the work laptop full of corporate spyware are the real psychos.
toast0 2y ago
I think the answer to the question is that clearly, using personal equipment when company equipment is available is the wrong answer. But, knowingly picking the wrong answer can be ok if you get some benefit from it. Personally, it's not too hard to keep home and work computers mostly separate; at times, I might do a smidge of work on a home computer, or a smidge of home stuff on a work computer, but hopefully it's pretty ephemeral: I don't want work content to stay on my home computer, or home content to stay on my work computer. At my last job, I was subject to legal holds all the time and compliance is easy if corporate has access to everything and I don't really need to do anything. By the same token, I had to administer legal searches of email, and sometimes that caught personal matters which nobody else needed to see (including me); avoiding that kind of access would be great. Otoh, keeping personal and work phones separate is just too hard for me. I don't want to carry two phones.

jdswain 2y ago

I liked this comment because it said what I was basically thinking. In my last job I kept everything seperate, a lot of people didn't and when we all got made redundant, I just closed my work laptop and walked away, some of the others were scrambling to disentangle everything and had all sorts of problems. But in my new job I'm doing work on my personal laptop. It started because, I travel by plane to work regularly. I was carrying three laptops, my personal one, my work one, and one provided by my current client. It was just so much easier to combine everything into one laptop and just carry that. It's working out really well. Before I was constantly moving from one laptop to another just to check messages. I think doing work on your personal computer is less bad than having personal stuff on your work computer, I wouldn't do that.

DrammBA 2y ago

People can be very judgemental here but I've done it for the past 15 years. I only use the work laptop to access stuff I know IT is logging, so they see the correct device with the correct serial making the connection, otherwise personal laptop for everything. I also use separate browsers (chrome for work, firefox for personal stuff) cause I'm not a psycho. Also I see people are conflating the use of a work laptop for personal stuff with using your personal laptop for work, those are very different and people doing personal stuff on the work laptop full of corporate spyware are the real psychos.

toast0 2y ago

I think the answer to the question is that clearly, using personal equipment when company equipment is available is the wrong answer. But, knowingly picking the wrong answer can be ok if you get some benefit from it. Personally, it's not too hard to keep home and work computers mostly separate; at times, I might do a smidge of work on a home computer, or a smidge of home stuff on a work computer, but hopefully it's pretty ephemeral: I don't want work content to stay on my home computer, or home content to stay on my work computer. At my last job, I was subject to legal holds all the time and compliance is easy if corporate has access to everything and I don't really need to do anything. By the same token, I had to administer legal searches of email, and sometimes that caught personal matters which nobody else needed to see (including me); avoiding that kind of access would be great. Otoh, keeping personal and work phones separate is just too hard for me. I don't want to carry two phones.