Ask HN: How are you separate your personal vs. work laptop? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How are you separate your personal vs. work laptop?

I know pretty well that my company laptop is capable of tracking almost everything I do. But still, I find it difficult to keep my digital life separate between personal vs. work. I often find myself doing mixed tasks, leaving my personal data and hobby works on the company's laptop all the time.

It is definitely not good for my company and me in the long term. I could potentially expose too much of my personal data to my company, or worst, accidentally leaking the company's data to my personal stuff.

Moving away from it is also challenging, for example, browser history, notes, messaging, emails, online activities...

How are you currently dealing with it? Or do you have this problem at all? I would love to learn. Thanks.

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Two different physical machines.

The more locked down the work laptop is, the less likely you are to want to use it for mixed purposes.

If the work laptop is running an OS that you hate, loathe, and despise, then you are likewise much less likely to use it for personal things. But then you’re also likely to be hating life, at least as it concerns work.

Don't do anything on your work computer that is not work related. I include reading tech news and visiting Hacker News in the group of work-related tasks because it is something that I can do and get away with at work. But I never use my work laptop to do anything I would not do in the office in front of other co-workers.

If you are working remotely you should bring your personal laptop with you or at least an iPad so that you can browse the internet as you would do in the privacy of your own home.

This is true and works as good advice. Some years back I was having my feedback call with HR person while I was being laid-off from the company, and one of the things she told me was my time spend on social networks and "other" websites not related to work (HN included). Reading between the lines here, IT is monitoring traffic and reporting it to managers at all levels. I was caught and, since then, I have never used my work device for anything but work.

I work from home, and rarely take my laptop out to work in other locations, so my setup is complex in terms of hardware, but simple in day-to-day working:

Two separate laptops. One 4k monitor. 1 keyboard/mouse/headset/ethernet. A KVM switch with a USB hub to make it take just a button press to swap between the two laptops while using the same peripherals.

I have Slack installed and signed in on both so I can remain available even if I've switched over to the personal laptop. And both are also connected to wifi, so my active laptop gets the gigabit ethernet, but the idle one still has connectivity for any background processes that are running.

I'm similar. I have the work laptop and my personal tower. My monitor has two hdmi inputs. I have a usb switch that handles my peripherals. When I switch over, I have to press the button on the usb switch and then change the monitor input. A bit more work than a kvm switch. A friend of mine used to have a pedal switch on the ground for his kvm, it was really nice.

Can you please post a link to the switch?

I sometimes use my work laptop for personal browsing, but I don't download or install personal hobby stuff on it. If I come across something I want to download for myself, I mail it or a link to me private email.

Easy. I keep my work laptop at work and my personal laptop at home.

As a remote worker I miss this so much. Having your work laptop available 24/7 makes it way too easy to sign on for a quick fix on a day off.

I'm 100% remote (so is the rest of our team).

The company doesn't pay for hardware devices at all (all staff are full-time). When I started with the company a few years ago, I used my personal laptop with a separate user account called "Work".

A colleague I used to work with did the same. They had a MBP and set up a secondary user also called work. They had an "incident" on Slack involving a crude photo and eventually quit due to embarrassment.

I sucked up the cost and bought a separate device out of pocket. My personal laptop is 100% personal and my work laptop is 100% work (I refuse to even access email from my personal laptop). I also have a work phone that's 100% work.

Don't mix business and personal life unless you have literally no life outside of work.

Unrelated: is it weird to buy your own work computer if you're remote? I don't get any reimbursement from the company... I've always found this odd.

Unless you were a contractor, your company should have bought you a computer, full stop.

I bring two laptops. Mobile dev eats up all the CPU/RAM of a high end MacBook Pro, so a secondary laptop helps in dealing with dead time compiling.

I can keep my personal notes, passwords, etc on my personal laptop, as well as use it for referencing docs, etc.

Same goes for company phone. Don't put anything there that you wouldn't mind leaving in the office unlocked.

At first I treated them as the same (startup didn’t provide a laptop anyway..) and all was mixed.

When they provided one, I forced myself out of the convenience and set up two accounts, one personal and one for work.

Now i have a personal laptop and a work laptop.

———

The only overlap is 1Password I think.

Just to mention: You have to deal with migration of stuff only once. I personally have always used a separate device for work, and one for private things. Except for one time, that's the reason behind why I do now :D (even right now as a freelancer I have a laptop dedicated for work only, while right next to it, there's the PC I use for private purposes) Whenever I have a company laptop I try to have it as clean as it is of my personal stuff, so I usually would use a tablet and/or my phone for private stuff as long as there's not too much typing involved.

Just curious, how strictly do you keep your personal works away from the work device? Is there a lot of inconveniences you faced doing this? For example, if you need to book a flight quickly, do you have to wait until you get home?

Two machines. More accurately, I don't have a work laptop, so the computer I do my work on while at the office and the one I use at home are by necessity not the same device.

The software on each machine isn't connected account wise either, and anything work related that needs to be accessed when working remotely is merely done through a web browser anyway.

Work laptop came with an M.2 SSD and had a sata connector as well. Due to size both wouldn't fit buy you can fix it using an mSata disk and an adapter. https://imgur.com/ax7epyg

It's easy now to keep work and private separate since I need to shutdown one to boot in the other.

The disk in encrypted so my data is safe if they would ever take the laptop back without asking. But pulling out a disk is going to be way faster then copying or erasing.

Two different computers: the work computer stays in the office and very rarely comes home; the home computer stays home. Work happens at work, work doesn't happen at home.

I don't sign in to any work related comms (email, slack, etc) outside of work hours so there's no need to have any work related stuff on my non work machine

I have separate machines for work and home. I also have separate Skype and Gmail IDs for work. If I have to check SM while at work, I do that on my phone.

Don't do that, have your own personal computer and phone.

Use a completely separate data-directory for your browsers. For chrome , —user-data-dir c:/secret. For firefox —-profile c:/secret

browser history and bookmarks, are sync'ed over google accounts ( there's nothing super private there i would mind Google to peek over ) also google keep for quick notes and reminders. All the rest sits separated on the work machine XOR personal machine.

I have a desktop at work, and a personal laptop at home. When I work from home I use Teamviewer.

VirtualBox, I keep work in separate VM.

I bring two laptop

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