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> If your employer wants you to have Slack on a phone, they should buy you a phone. That’s been my situation across multiple employers for 5+ years.

I wholeheartedly agree with computers/systems, and keeping things separate there.. but two phones? Who wants to carry around two phones just for staying on top of slack during _off hours_?

If the company isn't ok with me using slack on my personal phone, then I'll only use slack on the supplied computer during business hours (eg. they get no mobile slack out of me at all). Either that or I find a different job. Life is too short to deal with so many devices and the hassle of it all.

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A better question is why do you feel the need to “stay on top of slack” during your non work hours?

Having entirely separate devices is BY FAR the best thing I have done for my mental health and productivity. Same as other posters here.

I love my job and I love my life and I deliberately blend them together. This makes me substantially more productive as an employee, and incalculably happier as a human being.

If I want to see a friend in the middle of the day, I do it. If I want to take a 3 hour lunch, I do it. When someone 8 time zones away answers a question I asked earlier at my 1AM, and I’m awake and see it, I’m excited to learn the new whatever thing, and may take an hour (or three!) to chat with them about it.

Everything I do in life I have opted into and enjoy. I gain nothing by firewalling some parts of it from other parts.

I have tried every modality of managing work and personal life and this one is by far —- by far —- the best one for me. The notion that there is a work laptop and a personal laptop and naer the twain shall meet is a complete anachronism. It’s fine if that separation helps other people but it actively hurts me.

For some odd reason, I instantly thought of Foucault's idea of biopower[1][2] after reading your comment as a possible counterpoint, despite not being well-versed in the subject.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biopower [2]: https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/8237/8/Review%20article%20-%20...

That’s fun! Yeah, I buy it, but to the extent it works as a counterargument I’d say it’s actually more of an inevitability.

> The notion that there is a work laptop and a personal laptop and naer the twain shall meet is a complete anachronism. It’s fine if that separation helps other people but it actively hurts me.

Wow.. All I can suggest is think through the consequences. Unless you work for yourself or a very tiny startup, your employer is monitoring everything you do and store on the work computer.

You may also get cut off at any moment with zero notice if there are layoffs. If you had any personal content there, you've lost it.

Also, depending on where you live, but it can also mean now the company has a strong ownership claim to anything and everything you do in side projects since it is being done on company equipment.

I work for a large company, I have a desktop machine, I fail to see how the company would have access to it (assuming they aren’t using any zero day exploits etc to attack it). They don’t have my private ssh key so can’t ssh in, it sits on my desk at home so they have no physical access. It came straight from the factory and I installed vanilla Ubuntu on it.

Not your case, obviously, but there is a plethora of management software (like Workspace One) that is mandated in some companies.

> It came straight from the factory and I installed vanilla Ubuntu on it.

In that case hopefully not but as seen elsewhere in this thread, for other OSs they can fully own it even if shipped factory direct.

Unless manufacturers are putting these spyware hooks directly into the firmware? Haven't heard of that yet, but those things change.

This is such a hilariously American post. I realize most of this forum is American, but still. :-)

I know, right ;)

And it's not really representative of the US. I work for anything but a tiny startup on a personal MacBook and no one is monitoring everything I do.

> on a personal MacBook and no one is monitoring everything I do

Well you said personal MacBook, this topic is about work laptop or phone.

These days (sadly) for any non-small company, all work computers and phones have remote control spyware. If you think that's not the case in your large company, you're probably wrong.

At a recent medium size engineering company, I was constantly surprised how even extremely technical engineers in the company didn't realize all the company spyware that is running on their laptop.

The standard Linux laptops people are given are fully company-managed. But many people, including myself, reload them with a distribution we manage ourselves.

I do have MDM on my personal iPhone but that seemed like a reasonable tradeoff in order to easily access work email and files on my phone.

Why else would an employer want you to use slack on a phone? "On-Call" devops rotation or something like that?

Same rules apply even in that case. If you can't txt/page/slack me on my personal phone, then you don't get me "on-call". I'm _not_ going to carry two phones for anyone ever again (been there, done that, hated it).

Having a work phone that you cannot be reached on outside of standard work hours kind of defeats the purpose right? At least that is the sole reason I can think of that I would need a work phone in the first place.

The purpose of a work phone is to carry it during the specifically agreed upon period that you are actively on-call.

And you should be compensated specifically for that on call time. A standard is 1/3 of your on call time out of business hours is credited as PTO hours for 30 minute response.

Or 2/3 of your on call time out of business hours is credited as PTO hours for 5 minute response.

> I wholeheartedly agree with computers/systems, and keeping things separate there.. but two phones? Who wants to carry around two phones just for staying on top of slack during _off hours_?

I have no issues carrying the work phone with me during the _working hours_. But off hours I just leave it next to the car keys, so I don't forget to take it with me the next morning. Just because I have a work phone that I didn't ask for doesn't mean I have to carry it with myself or even check off hours. It is useful only to have a toy to play with during the boring face-to-face meetings.

There's a virtualized Android concepts out there, but I really want it to go further. I already have dual sim in my phone, but Android has essentially no support for multiple independent copies of individual apps.

Of course, workplaces tend to insist on remote data wipe functionality and that's a big nope from the get go.

The sad thing is, Google could fix this and use their authoritative position to declare it safe: support multiple encryption keys in the secure enclave on a device, encrypt apps associated with different profiles with different keys, and allow registering "work" keys as remote wipeable. Throw in some sort of copy+paste restriction option to satisfy the pedant IT managers who think cameras aren't cheap and common.

Island (https://island.oasisfeng.com/) let’s you have multiple sandboxed apps running.

Shelter is identical but FOSS/without analytics: https://f-droid.org/packages/net.typeblog.shelter/

>Q: Why not use Island by OasisFeng, the creator of Greenify?

>A: Simply because it is not an FOSS app and it bundles with non-free SDKs. Note that this doesn’t necessarily mean that Island has anti-features like tracking (and I don’t think it has either), it’s just that I wrote Shelter as an FOSS replacement of it. There is no other reason why one would prefer Shelter over Island except for this one.

Thank you!

Haven't you just described Android's existing work profile feature? It works exactly like that as far as I'm aware.

Work profile requires explicit support from your IT department, but Android also supports multiple user accounts on one device (each gets their own lock screen, home screen, app switcher, notification shade, settings, installed apps, etc), so you could segregate things that way too if you can't get your IT department to support work profile.

I feel like multiple user accounts is an underappreciated feature of Android. I just got an iPad and it's a real drag that you can only have one Apple ID logged in on it, one set of apps, one home screen, etc. Tablets are made to be shared.

If carrying two phones is not feasible, why would carrying two laptops be? I've done work and person projects traveling through different countries at hotels and coffee shops pre-pandemic, and there is no way I would carry two phones OR two laptops.

why the hell would you want to stay on top of work during off hours?

Personally I like blurring the lines between work and private life. Do some personal stuff during work hours (no more messing around getting time off to go to the dentist or the bank - I just book a meeting in my calender and go). Answer a quick question while I'm on the subway. Spend an hour at night helping out a colleague in the US with an urgent problem when I have nothing better to do anyway. I'll just sleep in in the morning when things are quiet. I love this.

What matters also is that I really like my work. And it isn't forced on me or even expected in the slightest. It's nice when I can pop in when I'm off and help out. If not it's fine too. Flexibility.

For me this works. I understand it doesn't work for many others like yourself. But that doesn't mean it should be made impossible for me (like some countries do, e.g. in France forcing work email to stop after hours).

Same. I don't overwork. Except maybe when I travel but I like travel. If I'm "off the clock" whether vacation or after 5, I'm not going to (nor be expected to) suddenly spend the rest of the night dealing with something. But maybe I can write an email or two or take a quick look at a doc which helps someone. And, as you say, I don't feel guilty going to the store or the dentist during the day.

I'm happy to see this is not just me with this perspective. Especially with WFH, I routinely work out, do groceries, go for a walk, or just read during work time (I'm self employed but the pattern has not changed at all since I left my salaried job). I make up for it by working at other times that work for me, and if e.g. I'm reading a book, I'll keep Slack on the phone so I can be available for a discussion. Most of my team at my last job was similar, usually with some set of disconnected times, e.g. for family stuff. Some would sleep in and work late, some would have supper early and put kids to bed, then work some more... I like this approach so much better than being stuck somewhere for 8 hours forced to try to be productive.

I think this mixes up two things: (1) segmentor-integrator dichotomy and (2) flexible working patterns.

For example, I am an extreme segmentor (two laptops and two phones, both of which are either off or put away in silent mode when I'm not working; zero work-related stuff on any personal devices).

At the same, my working patterns are very flexible. I just look at my diary first thing in the morning to figure which meetings I need to attend, and plan the rest of the day however I see fit. Going to the gym, for a run, sitting outside to read, running errands or getting a massage in the middle of the day are all completely normal.

I encourage my reports to take a similarly flexible approach to working, regardless of where they are on the segmentor-integrator spectrum (most of them are integrators).

I like working like this too - I want to be able to work when inspiration strikes, or when my customers need me, and not be forced to busywork when it's not necessary. Of course, it helps that my work is really my hobby and, to some degree, what I do for fun.

I also want to be fairly compensated, though, and if I'm lying awake at 4am solving the hard problems because I'm so engrossed in my project that I'm dreaming about it, the only really fair compensation is a percentage of the profits. So for me, since nowhere I've worked is willing to contemplate a profit-share arrangement, this kind of work only really works if I own the company.

For some of us, we kind of make up off hours as we go. If it’s 2pm and I’m bored and I have no meetings, I might just take 3 hours off and go to the park or gym, and if a coworker has a question during that time, I don’t mind answering it.

I prefer to do things whenever I want to do them and not bother with “on” and “off” hours.

Exactly. It is nice for "flex-work"--go walk the dog or run some errands or something, but still be "semi-available" for questions, but not "at the computer".

Schadenfreude

> Who wants to carry around two phones just for staying on top of slack during _off hours_?

Why would I be doing that?

What's the point of having phones thinner than razor blades, if not to facilitate carrying two of them? I think I could stack 5 or more phones and they'd still easily fit in my pocket.

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