How do startups manage laptops/mobile phones for their remote employees? | Hacker News Reader

How do startups manage laptops/mobile phones for their remote employees?

Hello HN! We're a small remote team based out of Europe and India. Yes, by Europe, I mean we're looking to throw a wider net across Europe to find good developers rather than just from the main tech hubs around Amsterdam/Berlin/Paris additional to a small team based out of India.

I wanted to know if any startups do a similar startup and how they manage the devices i.e. delivery, collection of the device if the employee quits. Is there any startup/business that offers this kind of device logistics management across Europe/India? Open to ideas.

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We just ship them. Do some initial setup for them, have them boot up on the first day, start a call and make sure they can connect to everything they need, and they are off and running. When they leave, send them a box with the shipping label already all printed, so they ship it back just by putting it in the box and dropping it off at DHL/UPS/FedEx.

If you use all Apple products (phone and laptop), you can set up Apple MDM on all of them.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204142

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/devicemanagement

https://www.apple.com/mx/business-docs/DEP_Guide.pdf [PDF]

OT, but as a Vienna-based, British dev currently looking for remote roles, I'm glad you're open to the "anywhere in Europe" concept of remote working. Any info on tech stack/skills you're seeking?

Slightly on-topic: I've worked fully remote before, and seen employers solve this by having new kit shipped first to the sysadmin guy, who was also WFH, then when he'd carried out the usual corporate setup procedures would ship the machine to developer's home address. No big deal for a small team, but I agree you might want to outsource that at scale.

Don't....

use virtualized desktops hooked into your company's intranet.

For phones, there are some vendors that provide similar functionality.

As a person that’s been in development, devops, secops, network engineering and now co-runs a software backed IT service startup focused on SMB’s, this doesn’t actually work well IRL in my opinion.

Hosted desktops require a consistent, reliable data connection. Which means any time mobility (car, plane, train, etc) is on the agenda or if an employee needs to work from an area without 100Mbps or better broadband (rural), work or access to work is complicated at best. Further, accessing that hosted environment still requires some kind of user hardware anyway.

Dedicated hardware per employee is still the best route in my opinion. At least then, if data connectivity is nowhere to be found, they can still get stuff done.

Drones

Employer-managed devices are crap, IMHO. Pay your employees well enough that they can buy their own devices; trust your employees to secure their work assets, and make SecOps training first-class. Everything else is flushing cash down the toilet.

If you can't trust your employees, you are either a psychopath or have poor employee acquisition hygiene.

If an employer expects me to install a device policy on my phone, they should buy me a second phone.

That said, this comment established a false dichotomy between trusting your employees and doing defense in depth. Following your logic, employers that require two-factor auth must either be "psychopaths" or have "poor employee acquisition hygiene" because they don't trust me to use a unique password and avoid getting phished. Trusting someone doesn't mean being certain that they will never make a mistake.

This isn't viable for businesses that need to comply with SOC2, ISO27001, etc.

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