Should employees buy their own computer?
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
So now my job performance depends on how much money I'm willing to spend on products that are for the company's benefit. If I'm not willing to cough up enough dough, I won't get good reviews or raises. I might even be fired for under-performing!
Yeah, this sounds like a great idea... If you want to invite lawsuits.
Having said that, I bring my own mouse and keyboard to work. I didn't ask, I just did it. The comfort was worth more to me than it was to them, apparently.
Ten years ago joining a major corporation gave you access to resources you didn't have on your own. Exchange was better than Yahoo mail. The T20 cost so much almost no one would buy it for personal use.
Today when student graduate they are often used to and already own Mac laptops or high-end PCs and are using Google services. They can lose productivity going from these (cloud) consumer to enterprise technology systems.
I recommend the Gartner report "Gartner_Report_BYOC_checklist.pdf" on BYOC.
More likely, employees would be forced to buy the one computer that IT specifies. And, knowing how much VB.NET code is running out there now, it'll end up being a top-of-the-line enterprise Dell laptop, crippled with XP and all of their network policies.
Somebody who's forced to buy a laptop and then give all control away won't be a happy body.
But having people bring in their home computers that might be virus-infected or part of a botnet to work? Err, no. I've had more than one home computer brought to me to fix and I have never once let them on the network. I don't need to find out that the next Sasser/Blaster/whatever is now rampaging through our internal network.
That's not to say that there aren't people and companies (likely small ones) that couldn't handle this. But unless each person was a pretty decent computer admin who was not likely to install crapware, kept themselves patched, etc., I wouldn't trust them at all.
But, like I said, I've seen the home machines of the people at work and I've removed viruses from them. There's no way I'd put them on our network even though I don't think there's anything they could infect. It's just not smart.
I don't really see how this applies. Some people are fortunate that they may be able to afford to buy a computer for work, others less so. It's not a one size fits all situation, and whether or not the speed of someone's workstation would make a difference to their job hasn't much bearing on it.
Of course, the article is confused between people working via remote desktop and people providing their own compute power, which kind of muddies the topic.
I have done work in the past on my own machine of course, but I think for companies to come to expect this is placing an unhealthy burden on the employee. Personal machines are not necessarily reliable, nor can they often be repaired or replaced at short notice. If I was required to take work home, I would prefer to have a machine dedicated to that purpose, and I certainly wouldn't be happy about the idea of having to provide it myself.
Where remote access is concerned, it becomes more a matter of preference. A faster machine in this instance is unlikely to make much difference, so this becomes less of an issue. Here an employee providing their own machine would be doing it more for personal preference or comfort.
If anything, the opposite is true... As a programmer, I can tell you I could get a lot done with not much power, and I say this having developed professionally on a SPARC 10 (look up the specs, and I don't mean an Ultra 10).
There are certainly complexities to bring-your-own-PC programs, especially with less technically savvy users, but the personal cost aspect isn't really one of them. (Especially given that most such programs have a subsidy.)
That would work for me (as an employee).
However, if I ran a despotic company where employees were apt to act out against "the man" I'd be pretty nervous about letting Pandora bring in her own box, so to speak.
Most professionals are expected to maintain their own tools.
Most mechanics have their own tools, having the tools you like to use at your disposal is essential to doing a good job. The tools are also far more expensive than a computer.
Personally, I would have loved to be able to bring my own computer to work and would have allowed me to drop the hassle of trying to hide the improvements I was making to their dev machine.
Buying your own computer in dev is kind of like a lawyer buying his own suits. It may affect his job if he doesn't look sharp. There are lots of places to work and if the place you work at doesn't recognize the additional productivity you have gained from buying good tools then perhaps it is not the place one should work.
My point is, I think there a lot of examples on both sides.
A reasonable company should not argue about a $1.5K versus $3K laptop when they're paying so much more for salary, benefits, and overhead for the person using the system. At my workplace these total around $250K-$280K per person per year.
The first few paragraphs miss the point, though: they imply that this kind of remote access is quicker if you're using a brand new laptop than some old Windows XP PC.
"The design that we implemented was that no data or access to the device was enabled locally, so you can plug in your USB but it would not be registered when you have a Citrix connection."
To take another example of forcing security in a client device. I have push email from the office to my iPhone but it's implemented in such a way that forces using a passcode to access the iPhone.
Forgive me while I laugh at this. If an employee's computer is compromised, the company VMs running inside it are vulnerable. It makes no difference that the connection is secure if one endpoint is not.
The safe way to do it is to hand the employee a locked down device strictly for work.
An alternative, maybe, is to hand them a locked hypervisor which allows them to run personal, alongside work VMs (but not allow them to install anything at the same level as the hypervisor (no dual-booting)).
Edit: Thinking about this, the company may issue USB secure tokens linked to a truecrypt drive. The employee would dual-boot either into the work environment (locked down) or a personal environment, with the warning that the token must never be connected in the personal environment.
I work remotely, from home, using my own hardware. That means I have administrative access, an SSD, 12GB of memory, overclocked i7 CPU, etc., which all adds up to a machine that can build our source tree faster than the build servers that are "optimized" for it by IT. When I visit base, co-workers are amazed at my build times; usually less than 50% of the time on their workstations.
Most of these advantages would be negated by using a remote desktop / app solution, but then, the advantages may be largely specific to certain kinds of workloads.
We ended up having a scaled down IT services for the "poets" and the techies could use their own thing. That worked well and people were happy, although security was an ongoing debate since laptops get stolen a lot and people don't tend to put encryption on anything unless you force them to. We ended up doing "spot checks" on various occasions to check if backups/etc, were up to scratch.
After I left new management was too worried about security and brought it back in house (although we'd never had serious incidents). The dissatisfaction that caused among employees was huge, it's really much harder to give up freedom than if you've never had it in the first place.
"Staff taking advantage of the scheme must buy a three-year service contract."I wonder if people get to chose their OS under this scheme?
So properly not.
Double-checking still left me with some (tiny bit of) hope : http://www.mcafee.com/us/products/virusscan-enterprise-for-l...
Generally speaking, formal BYOPC programs are more restrictive but in lots of high tech companies, people use a variety of their own gear.
Nice try, Citrix PR Company.
The consultants walking around with their own laptops generally have internally mandated compliance requirements for things like encryption, host firewalls and antivirus.