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> Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them […] At $WORK we have the option of getting a work smartphone

> Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them […] At $WORK we have the option of getting a work smartphone or having the company pay for (at portion of) our monthly mobile bill. I chose a work device because I do not want any cross-contamination. (Others chose payment because they did not want the 'hassle' of carrying a second device (and to save some cash).)

ChrisMarshallNY 3mo ago
In my early career, I used my work computer (off hours) to do personal work. I never made any money, but it was still wrong. At some point, I couldn’t live with myself, and purchased my own computer (better than what work gave me, anyway). I never used my personal cell for work. The closest thing was coordinating meetups, when traveling.
- JohnMakin 3mo ago
  It’s not just wrong, you’re potentially allowing anything you do on that work computer to 1) be owned by the company and 2) be discoverable in court. it’s amazing how many it orgs are so lax with this. personal/work devices should and always be entirely separate. BYOD is a really bad crutch and a potential compliance nightmare timebomb for all parties.
- WatchDog 3mo ago
  If you are worried about the ethics of using a company laptop to do personal work, you might be taking it a bit far, what damage does this do to the company? If you are worried about the company claiming rights over your personal work, then it is prudent.
  - sqquima 3mo ago
    I think that the new version of this is using your work's LLM account (potentially more powerful) to do personal work
    - BowBun 3mo ago
      There was a brief moment in all the hullabaloo that this went unnoticed :X
    - davidw 3mo ago
      That potentially consumes a lot more resources than the very negligible marginal wear and tear that using a work computer would cause.
    - inlined 3mo ago
      That seems absolutely crazy to do. One could argue that the marginal cost to work for using a work laptop is zero and the work is still yours (still beyond the risk I’m willing to take). Using a company’s AI account is literally using the company’s resources for a personal project. There is no plausible case where they don’t own it.
      - swiftcoder 3mo ago
        > Using a company’s AI account is literally using the company’s resources for a personal project. There is no plausible case where they don’t own it. Honestly, of the two scenarios, this one is the more likely to fall on the employee's side. We haven't really tested the legal precedent for ownership of LLM outputs very thoroughly yet, and I'm willing to bet a bunch of us still have employment contracts that haven't been updated to cover LLM use...
  - vel0city 3mo ago
    As for what damage you do, it kind of depends on what you're doing. But in the end you're exposing your work machine to patterns and processes outside your normal job duties, potentially exposing it and the data/access it has to additional risks. It might be overly paranoid depending on what the circumstances are, it might be a real concern as well.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 3mo ago
    1) It really had nothing to do with what damage it does to the company. It’s a long story, but I take personal Integrity fairly seriously. It was about how I felt about it, inside. As I progressed, in my self-development, “cash register” honestly became more important. 2) That’s definitely a valid point. I have worked on free/open-source code for most of my adult life. For a long time, it was for my own use, but I started publishing code for use by others, and provenance became a much more important coefficient.
- refurb 3mo ago
  I did the same. Nothing nefarious on my work laptop, but I used it for websurfing (avoiding questionable sites), booking trips, etc. Then I realized how stupid that was even though my employer was fine with and was never strict with how a work laptop is used. I realized not only did I not want my work to know what I'm doing on my personal time, the risk of cross-contamination and being accused of stealing confidential documents or a personal text making it look like I'm doing something wrong is too high. I bought my own cell phone and laptop and now never use my work equipment for anything but work. Not worth the risk.
  - breppp 3mo ago
    > I realized not only did I not want my work to know what I'm doing on my personal time, the risk of cross-contamination and being accused of stealing confidential documents or a personal text making it look like I'm doing something wrong is too high. If they wrongfully accuse you of that, isn't it a place you should leave in any case?
    - mbreese 3mo ago
      I would guess you're probably right. But if you are accused of something, not having a separate non-work computer/phone could make that process worse.
    - refurb 3mo ago
      Name me a large corporation who "trusts" their employees. I'd pretty much be forced into unemployment if trust was a requirement.
crossroadsguy 3mo ago
Yeah. I was encouraged to take the lump-sum money my company paid (like most happily did - not taxed; amount equalling latest base iPhone cost) and get MDM installed on the personal phone so that we could access email and everything on that. Laptop was company issued anyway. I, and very few, chose company phone and I got a new SIM just for the company and set it up (they had to pay the SIM bill as well). A nice side effect of that was I could clearly control when the phone won't even be on me and I had set that expectation - like treks, or short personal vacations, sleeping hours (yes!). I had championed the "follow the sun" policy in my company when it came to on-call rotation, but somehow some of my fellow country men/women colleagues took pride in "being available". Anyway, their time, their choice. Later some of my colleagues were surprised when they couldn't install certain apps, couldn't do certain things and often used to wonder "does the company take screenshots of my phone?" because the permission was present :D
- OtomotO 3mo ago
  Exactly that. I wasn't reachable by phone for company related stuff outside my regular working hours unless I had on-call-duty, which means it was working hours. I don't get why people would be proud about not setting boundaries.
  - SpicyLemonZest 3mo ago
    It really depends on where you want to steer your career. There's some roles, especially in management, where "working hours only" isn't really an option; if you aspire to one of those you've gotta convince people you'll do what's necessary.
  - hvb2 3mo ago
    Some people are in it for the challenge. Someone else's outage? Yeah I'll happily help diagnose it, analysing and figuring out where the issue is can teach you a lot of things. For the record, this was never at night. Late in the evening, sure.
    - OtomotO 3mo ago
gorgoiler 3mo ago
Company IT policies really got it the wrong way around with “bring your own device”. My personal phone is the last device where I would want them to have a presence. Conversely, having them manage a laptop and workstation for me is never going to give me a device as nice as I’m used to at home. It’s as if they had two choices: “we’ll provide clothes but you can bring your own lunch!”; vs “wear your own clothes and we’ll provide lunch!” and they chose the weird one not the helpful one. I am extremely picky about keyboards, screens, and OS configuration as a result of being partially deaf, having poor eyesight, and honestly being a bit of an old stick in the mud. It would be lovely to set aside some space on an old Thinkpad for work tasks. It would be comfortable and easy to isolate and be just like my personal machine. Instead I get a choice between a MacBook with a fixed alternate key layout or a Windows machine with a locked down bright white wallpaper and a non admin account.
- progval 3mo ago
  Depending on where you live, your employer may be legally required to accommodate your disabilities. Here in France, HR are usually dutiful about it.
- detuur 3mo ago
  First thing I do at a new job is make friends with IT, if at all possible. I end up being the guy with the new high-dpi screens they're trialling, more RAM in my laptop, and "just DM me in Teams" privileges for tech support. All for not treating these people like tech janitors (and obviously there's nothing wrong with being a janitor). Cheat code for this: ask them if they need any custom tooling. I spent a few hours at a past job on a userscript for their ticketing interface to fix some annoyances. Brownie points for life.
OtomotO 3mo ago
Many years ago my mom chose to have the company pay for her private phone number. When she stopped working for them, they informed her, that the number legally belonged to them. It was not a problem for her, because she wanted to get rid of the number anyway, else too many old clients would call. But it was an interesting situation nonetheless.
socalgal2 3mo ago
Like you I keep them separate. Not just my phone. I don't do anything personal on work devices (don't log into personal email or banks, etc...) But, I believe I'm in the minority. Most of my fellow employees have added corp to their phone. I believe most do personal stuff on their work computer. I get it, it's inconvenient. I've gone to offsites and given don't have corp on my phone I have to pull out my corp laptop to contact people and/or lookup stuff that they wouldn't. It would also be much nicer to set personal appointments or deal with personal things I need to during business hours on a laptop than my phone. On rare occasions I bring my laptop to work if I know I'm going to need access to my stuff even though all of it is in the cloud so theoretically I could access it from a work laptop. I was once at an SV party and several Apple employees (3 women, 5 gay men, 3 straight men) said they all used their work laptops to watch porn at home or traveling. I was pretty shocked. Not that they watched but that they used work laptops for it. They all thought it was fine. It came up because, for some reason I mentioned I always take 2 laptops on business trips, my personal one and my work one. They said they never do that, they just take their work one and do personal stuff. I asked, what about porn and they all said they watched on work laptops. That was a very long way to say I think people like myself who separate the two are rare.
- unsupp0rted 3mo ago
  [dead]
- xp84 3mo ago
  > I asked, what about porn I love that you went there directly, that’s hilarious. I would have wondered the same (wouldn’t we all?), but been embarrassed to ask.
izacus 3mo ago
Doesn't your phone support creating an isolated profile which deliberately keeps data separate?
andyjohnson0 3mo ago
> I chose a work device because I do not want any cross-contamination. This is a wise choice. For me, nothing personal goes onto my work phone or laptop. And nothing work-related goes onto personal devices. Life is just easier that way.

ChrisMarshallNY 3mo ago

In my early career, I used my work computer (off hours) to do personal work. I never made any money, but it was still wrong. At some point, I couldn’t live with myself, and purchased my own computer (better than what work gave me, anyway). I never used my personal cell for work. The closest thing was coordinating meetups, when traveling.

JohnMakin 3mo ago
It’s not just wrong, you’re potentially allowing anything you do on that work computer to 1) be owned by the company and 2) be discoverable in court. it’s amazing how many it orgs are so lax with this. personal/work devices should and always be entirely separate. BYOD is a really bad crutch and a potential compliance nightmare timebomb for all parties.
WatchDog 3mo ago
If you are worried about the ethics of using a company laptop to do personal work, you might be taking it a bit far, what damage does this do to the company? If you are worried about the company claiming rights over your personal work, then it is prudent.
- sqquima 3mo ago
  I think that the new version of this is using your work's LLM account (potentially more powerful) to do personal work
  - BowBun 3mo ago
    There was a brief moment in all the hullabaloo that this went unnoticed :X
  - davidw 3mo ago
    That potentially consumes a lot more resources than the very negligible marginal wear and tear that using a work computer would cause.
  - inlined 3mo ago
    That seems absolutely crazy to do. One could argue that the marginal cost to work for using a work laptop is zero and the work is still yours (still beyond the risk I’m willing to take). Using a company’s AI account is literally using the company’s resources for a personal project. There is no plausible case where they don’t own it.
    - swiftcoder 3mo ago
      > Using a company’s AI account is literally using the company’s resources for a personal project. There is no plausible case where they don’t own it. Honestly, of the two scenarios, this one is the more likely to fall on the employee's side. We haven't really tested the legal precedent for ownership of LLM outputs very thoroughly yet, and I'm willing to bet a bunch of us still have employment contracts that haven't been updated to cover LLM use...
- vel0city 3mo ago
  As for what damage you do, it kind of depends on what you're doing. But in the end you're exposing your work machine to patterns and processes outside your normal job duties, potentially exposing it and the data/access it has to additional risks. It might be overly paranoid depending on what the circumstances are, it might be a real concern as well.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3mo ago
  1) It really had nothing to do with what damage it does to the company. It’s a long story, but I take personal Integrity fairly seriously. It was about how I felt about it, inside. As I progressed, in my self-development, “cash register” honestly became more important. 2) That’s definitely a valid point. I have worked on free/open-source code for most of my adult life. For a long time, it was for my own use, but I started publishing code for use by others, and provenance became a much more important coefficient.
refurb 3mo ago
I did the same. Nothing nefarious on my work laptop, but I used it for websurfing (avoiding questionable sites), booking trips, etc. Then I realized how stupid that was even though my employer was fine with and was never strict with how a work laptop is used. I realized not only did I not want my work to know what I'm doing on my personal time, the risk of cross-contamination and being accused of stealing confidential documents or a personal text making it look like I'm doing something wrong is too high. I bought my own cell phone and laptop and now never use my work equipment for anything but work. Not worth the risk.
- breppp 3mo ago
  > I realized not only did I not want my work to know what I'm doing on my personal time, the risk of cross-contamination and being accused of stealing confidential documents or a personal text making it look like I'm doing something wrong is too high. If they wrongfully accuse you of that, isn't it a place you should leave in any case?
  - mbreese 3mo ago
    I would guess you're probably right. But if you are accused of something, not having a separate non-work computer/phone could make that process worse.
  - refurb 3mo ago
    Name me a large corporation who "trusts" their employees. I'd pretty much be forced into unemployment if trust was a requirement.

crossroadsguy 3mo ago

Yeah. I was encouraged to take the lump-sum money my company paid (like most happily did - not taxed; amount equalling latest base iPhone cost) and get MDM installed on the personal phone so that we could access email and everything on that. Laptop was company issued anyway. I, and very few, chose company phone and I got a new SIM just for the company and set it up (they had to pay the SIM bill as well). A nice side effect of that was I could clearly control when the phone won't even be on me and I had set that expectation - like treks, or short personal vacations, sleeping hours (yes!). I had championed the "follow the sun" policy in my company when it came to on-call rotation, but somehow some of my fellow country men/women colleagues took pride in "being available". Anyway, their time, their choice. Later some of my colleagues were surprised when they couldn't install certain apps, couldn't do certain things and often used to wonder "does the company take screenshots of my phone?" because the permission was present :D

OtomotO 3mo ago
Exactly that. I wasn't reachable by phone for company related stuff outside my regular working hours unless I had on-call-duty, which means it was working hours. I don't get why people would be proud about not setting boundaries.
- SpicyLemonZest 3mo ago
  It really depends on where you want to steer your career. There's some roles, especially in management, where "working hours only" isn't really an option; if you aspire to one of those you've gotta convince people you'll do what's necessary.
- hvb2 3mo ago
  Some people are in it for the challenge. Someone else's outage? Yeah I'll happily help diagnose it, analysing and figuring out where the issue is can teach you a lot of things. For the record, this was never at night. Late in the evening, sure.
  - OtomotO 3mo ago

gorgoiler 3mo ago

Company IT policies really got it the wrong way around with “bring your own device”. My personal phone is the last device where I would want them to have a presence. Conversely, having them manage a laptop and workstation for me is never going to give me a device as nice as I’m used to at home. It’s as if they had two choices: “we’ll provide clothes but you can bring your own lunch!”; vs “wear your own clothes and we’ll provide lunch!” and they chose the weird one not the helpful one. I am extremely picky about keyboards, screens, and OS configuration as a result of being partially deaf, having poor eyesight, and honestly being a bit of an old stick in the mud. It would be lovely to set aside some space on an old Thinkpad for work tasks. It would be comfortable and easy to isolate and be just like my personal machine. Instead I get a choice between a MacBook with a fixed alternate key layout or a Windows machine with a locked down bright white wallpaper and a non admin account.

progval 3mo ago
Depending on where you live, your employer may be legally required to accommodate your disabilities. Here in France, HR are usually dutiful about it.
detuur 3mo ago
First thing I do at a new job is make friends with IT, if at all possible. I end up being the guy with the new high-dpi screens they're trialling, more RAM in my laptop, and "just DM me in Teams" privileges for tech support. All for not treating these people like tech janitors (and obviously there's nothing wrong with being a janitor). Cheat code for this: ask them if they need any custom tooling. I spent a few hours at a past job on a userscript for their ticketing interface to fix some annoyances. Brownie points for life.

OtomotO 3mo ago

Many years ago my mom chose to have the company pay for her private phone number. When she stopped working for them, they informed her, that the number legally belonged to them. It was not a problem for her, because she wanted to get rid of the number anyway, else too many old clients would call. But it was an interesting situation nonetheless.

socalgal2 3mo ago

Like you I keep them separate. Not just my phone. I don't do anything personal on work devices (don't log into personal email or banks, etc...) But, I believe I'm in the minority. Most of my fellow employees have added corp to their phone. I believe most do personal stuff on their work computer. I get it, it's inconvenient. I've gone to offsites and given don't have corp on my phone I have to pull out my corp laptop to contact people and/or lookup stuff that they wouldn't. It would also be much nicer to set personal appointments or deal with personal things I need to during business hours on a laptop than my phone. On rare occasions I bring my laptop to work if I know I'm going to need access to my stuff even though all of it is in the cloud so theoretically I could access it from a work laptop. I was once at an SV party and several Apple employees (3 women, 5 gay men, 3 straight men) said they all used their work laptops to watch porn at home or traveling. I was pretty shocked. Not that they watched but that they used work laptops for it. They all thought it was fine. It came up because, for some reason I mentioned I always take 2 laptops on business trips, my personal one and my work one. They said they never do that, they just take their work one and do personal stuff. I asked, what about porn and they all said they watched on work laptops. That was a very long way to say I think people like myself who separate the two are rare.

unsupp0rted 3mo ago
[dead]
xp84 3mo ago
> I asked, what about porn I love that you went there directly, that’s hilarious. I would have wondered the same (wouldn’t we all?), but been embarrassed to ask.

izacus 3mo ago

Doesn't your phone support creating an isolated profile which deliberately keeps data separate?

andyjohnson0 3mo ago

> I chose a work device because I do not want any cross-contamination. This is a wise choice. For me, nothing personal goes onto my work phone or laptop. And nothing work-related goes onto personal devices. Life is just easier that way.