From experience, I totally understand your frustration - and to anyone in this situation, I would suggest leaving to a company that provides modern hardware. That being said, I humbly ask that you try to put yourself in the shoes of those who are charged with ensuring these machines remain complaint (contractual obligations that must be met). Meeting these compliance obligations means continued, uninterrupted business, and that business pays our salary.
From a security/compliance perspective, I don't think it's unreasonable to do your work on a locked down machine if you are able to do your job, assuming that you have a modern machine that will plow through the overhead effortlessly. If you weren't provided with a modern machine though that can do this - get out of there as fast as you can.
Not at all. But from a security perspective I think it's also not unreasonable to request that my data isn't exfiltrated to some shady anti-virus company and my personal details aren't stored in a rancid (active) directory service.
And I just... don't care anymore. I know it's not y'all's fault. It's the fault of the biz world which refuses to cater to any but the lowest common denominator. They could go for a solution that works with minimalist Linux systems so their sec suite doesn't conflict with my desired userland, like say a kernel extension interfacing with a daemon that just does the basics. Offer instructions and say you're on your own if you wanna go this route. Instead I get Carbon Black rammed down my throat. Which is better than McAfee but still. And McAfee still won't uninstall cleanly, and guess whether I have root access.
The problem is these companies simply don't want to work with their most capable and talented engineers. And, well, I just don't care anymore. These companies can just bleed talent to the free software sector for the next decade or two.
As an added bonus, it gives you one more place to run bloated^Wmandatory Electron apps.
I'd rather keep my .gitconfig hacks and a single machine.
Not everyone has the same "dirt cheap" requirements for hardware for work; I work in games where a medium-range GPU is a requirement, and compiling large projects requires a much higer spec CPU (e.g. everyone on our team has at least a 3970x, which is ~$2000, and comes with a motherboard of $800). There's also space considerations - having two desktop machines works if you live in the US where houses are enormous; meanwhile I live in a 500sqft apartment with a 55 inch wide desk in my second bedroom - putting a second tower, plus extra power plus a KVM plus extra networking is a no-go.
Depends on the job. Work machines are often unusable because of measures mandated by employers to protect IP. Especially with big employers, you can't just get a random physical or virtual machine and do work-related things on it, not without angering the IT or cybersecurity department.
The kind of company you want to work for in that cases is one that just lets you buy whatever machine you want, with a budget that exceeds whatever you'd buy for your private one.
Anyway, I could work with my old macbook, but it's giving the ghost, the screen is fooked and getting that fixed is too expensive.
I've been working on MacBooks for work for the better part of a decade, in large part to keep my work and personal machines separate, but I was much better off when I just did work on my personal Linux machine. I also didn't have to deal with switching monitor inputs and KVMs and the clutter of a laptop taking up precious desk space.
I've even had people build their own PCs when starting at startups because they wanted specific specs.
I used my own machine while the work-provided laptop sat next to me the whole time until I was forced to use the provided laptop. On one hand, my life-work balance improved, on the other hand I loath the stupidly slow machine that seems limited in every aspect compared to my own.
It's been awesome. Everything set up exactly how I want it, with beautiful themes, colors and shortcuts.