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Comment by lopkeny12ko | Hacker News Reader

Regardless of the tone and attitude of the rant, is it not concerning that 30 employees, all of whom are remote and not on PTO, have not even opened their laptops in a month? If I were in leadership, I'd be concerned too.

Hell, my company MDM will automatically revoke many permissions if it doesn't get an automated device check-in at least once every two weeks or so.

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During COVID while I was WFH full time, I had a corporate IT-owned laptop whose primary purpose seemed to be to receive massive quantities of security updates and new security software installs, and reboot (it felt like!) every few hours, and run sluggishly when not obviously engaged in the above activities. After a day or two of this, I unplugged it and stored it in my closet for the remainder of my tenure with that employer (more than 1 year).

During the time that laptop lived powered off in my closet, I ran Citrix RDP (client on a personal desktop PC) to access a "engineering-owned" (vs corporate IT-owned) desktop PC located "at the office" on which I did 100% of my normal work.

I left my work laptop in the office and remoted in to it from home. I didn't want to have company equipment in my home for an extended period of time.

> is it not concerning that 30 employees, all of whom are remote and not on PTO, have not even opened their laptops in a month?

One of the employees commented that the company gave a lot of people outdated Thinkpads, so they use their personal computers at home.

I had a company-issued laptop that I only used when traveling. If the company looked up stats on laptop use, I would have been near the bottom of the list for that reason. Doesn't mean I wasn't working.

In many companies, using your personal device is grounds for immediate termination.

This is not a universal rule, nor should it be.

If it were the case here, it seems very likely that it would have been mentioned.

And at many companies, it's not.

Why is it worth complaining about? If it’s true then just fire them.

It explains the company changing its “remote only” promise to those employees they hired on that basis. They gave it a try and got robbed of 30 months salary.

"They gave it a try and claimed they got robbed of 30 months salary."

Fixed that for you.

I do software development too, if opening my laptop was the only metric by which I was measured, damn, that would be pretty sweet! /s

You’ve gone 30 days without touching a computer writing software? I’ve been at it for 40 years now, that’s never happened to me.

No I haven't, I was using sarcasm, to indicate that I think the CEO is straight up lying about the anecdote and it's just something he is using as cover for the policy change.

Heh, I don't always catch nuance in text communications.

It sounds plausible to me, with the recent trend of some taking 2 jobs because remote enables that behavior. I don't know how widespread this cheating practice is, but I have seen people brag online they are doing it.

> , all of whom are remote and not on PTO, have not even opened their laptops in a month?

But in the call, he said "I'm not saying they haven't done any work...."

So- these people can work without a laptop. Can they work as well? Who knows, he's not giving us any details - but this isn't a case of them doing nothing over the last month, or he wouldn't have added that caveat.

I'm local to the area of the company. Peeps in the community here have said they issue ridiculous old or underpowered laptops for many positions and that many if not all of those 30 employees are likely using their personal machines because they're more comfortable to the employee.

It's only concerning from a leadership point of view. If you know employees are not working for a month. Fire them. Obviously the company is moving along fine without their efforts. Why have them login when there's nothing for them to do?

Are those people hired to pilot their laptops?

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