Would you purchase hardware with your own money to use at work?
programmers.stackexchange.com
programmers.stackexchange.com
- You can't install software of any kind on your system (unless it's pushed out through whatever group policy they enable).
- USB ports are disabled (either physically in the case of government clients, or just by disabling mass storage drivers through group policy), and optical drives are read-only.
- Non work-issued systems aren't allowed on the network, and may not even be allowed in the building.
- Most importantly, you can't perform work from a non-work provided machine. In extreme cases, this includes things like email, but it almost always includes having company information on a machine that isn't your IT-issued one.
Most of these policies are created around the idea of limiting exposure of company-sensitive data (you can insert a joke about going through all this effort while exposing all your company data through an insecure web application).
Now, there are I'm sure, lots of smaller companies who don't enforce policies like that (I work for a really large company that has especially draconian IT policies, and most of my clients are rather large as well).
Even in the scenario where it wasn't explicitly forbidden, I'd be really hesitant about buying hardware for use in my job if for no other reason than it'd make for a potentially awkward situation if I left ("Sure, here's my laptop, but first you have to let me take out this hard drive that I've been using, as I bought it myself.")
I wonder what the tendency is among all companies regarding strong IT policies. I wouldn't consider working for a company like the one you describe, but I suppose to each his own. At my current company (mid-stage 30-ish person startup), I decided when I started that I didn't want to deal with maintaining more than one machine, so I use my personal laptop to do all my work, hooked up to a pair of external monitors the company provides. I really like this arrangement, and wouldn't have it any other way.
Stuff like this makes biz travel easier, as I don't have to compromise between bringing my work laptop or my more 'comfortable' personal laptop, since they're one and the same.
Yes, there's always the possibility of a fuss when you leave the company; they want to make sure you've deleted all their data from your machine, but in practice this hasn't been an issue for me (yet).
When you're working with millions lines of C, the speed of the compile decreases (nearly) linearly with the number of cores. Having gobs of memory speeds things up, too, because large portions of your filesystem will be cached in RAM all the time. Throw in a couple of VMs that you use for different build environments and you can easily suck up 4 gigs of RAM.