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Comment by jordanmorgan10 | Hacker News Reader

It sounds just crazy to me. Reason 10231 I'm thankful my employer doesn't issue us "Work laptops", and just outright buys us ours which we happen to use for work _and_ personal use.

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If you ever get popped then your entire laptop is sent off for forensics, and if you delete personal data it will appear as if you were tampering with it and will get fired anyway.

Always use a separate machine for work, and another for personal.

And any personal work you might have done using your work laptop now has a legal opening for your employer to claim ownership to, since you developed it using company assets.

Is this the case in most places (e.g. all of US, Europe?)

Definitely the case in the US. I don't know about Europe. It can feel silly thinking about this in our industry with laptop usage. However, for the general legal reasoning consider something like using a company server farm or a chemistry lab for research on your side project. The difference is only in scale.

I built and sold a company on "Work machine" since I've been employed here in the last 7 years. This setup only works because of the company and the culture. I can sympathize that it wouldn't work for larger employers.

Always this. The separation of intellectual property concerns alone is reason enough.

> you ever get popped then your entire laptop is sent off for forensics, and if you delete personal data it will appear as if you were tampering with it

You have the right to have your counsel filter what’s turned over for personal content.

This varies by country for sure. At my current company, you do not have this right. The device and all data on it belongs to the company and they can do what they want with it.

My counsel bills at a rate of new laptop an hour for this kind of work.

This is fine if your work is at a small company of some sort, but your personal data is at risk of be combed through if the company is ever subpoenaed or forced to participate in discovery and the discovery gets to "direct access". Even if not compelled by a court, when your company gets big enough, they may request you hand over said laptop for their own internal investigations over things like NDA compliance or workplace misconduct.

It could also come back to you in terms of IP ownership of personal code - using company-provided hardware can be a big factor for cases where the company claims that some amount of work you did was work-for-hire and thus owned by them.

Yup, it really only works because I do work at a small company. I imagine this wouldn't work for several reasons at BigCo.

Curious, why wouldn't you rather them buy you (or issue you) a work laptop and you get a personal laptop? Just don't use work hardware for not work things. (Unless you don't make enough to buy a personal laptop I guess, but of the jobs where they issue you hardware I bet they probably pay you enough to buy your own.)

Especially if you do a lot of travel, having to consciously partition what you use your devices for is just inconvenient. Circumstances differ of course. But I've never had an issue intermixing personal and work use.

I’ve seen people sharing their screens when private text messages pop up.

Sure, if you’re careful enough with notifications that shouldn’t happen, but I’d much rather take a personal iPad with me on travel and never risk it.

Travels a good one. Also, it's nice to be able to use personal devices for work stuff. Say you want to read a doc on your iPad or respond to an email on your phone. I totally understand the security perspective though.

Totally depends on circumstance. Senior government officials should almost certainly maintain clear separation. Highly regulated industries that are logging everything as in the current example. But a dogmatic position that no employee should ever intermix personal and work presences just isn't universally the case.

What happens if you try to start a side business? Any work you do with your work laptop has questionable copyright.

What happens if your company realizes they need to track leaks of their data for compliance? Do they need to force you to install software that looks at every file you download on your personal machine?

Separate machines is better for both the employee and employer.

Personally I struggle with the blurring of work and personal time so allowing myself up access personal social media, news, study materials makes it harder to say for sure when I've given my employer the amount of hours owed and can go do something else.

A lot of people don't have this issue, but I can't be the only one that does. I find strictly compartmentalising everything the only way to go.

Absolutely. If having hard boundaries work for you, that's totally what you should do.

My work overlaps so much that it would simply be a hassle to have two different machines. A lot of problems I solve on my own end up being used in our code base, and vice-versa. But I also work at a small company (less than 90 people), so we're more nimble than other companies I imagine.

A kvm isn’t too difficult to set up and could give you the protection of separating the hardware for your personal and work life

I really don't want compliance needing to see my personal laptop at 11pm versus just giving them my work machine.

Surely you would think differently if you were working in a heavily regulated environment with hefty fines and even heftier publicity stakes. It would be crazy if these restrictions were not in place.

Nobody will care about your average web development shop working on the usual stuff. Why would they spend all the money and resources to track you?

Once you have worked in both environments you realize it's just not that big a deal. I do have my private laptop anyway, and I prefer to keep it separate from workplace stuff anyway - even when I was in the same position (working for a company who provided a laptop that I had full control over). It just seems healthy to me.

Say it with me folks: DISCOVERY.

The reason why you do not want to co-mingle personal and work compute resources. If you are part of a legal discovery request at your organization, any device used to access corporate resources is at risk for retention. Suddenly all of those private photos and messages are not so private. So do yourself a favor and never ever ever mix your work resources with your personal devices. Never.

Absolutely and I feel exactly the same way. I have a base station for my Android phone and a KVM switch, both very cheap.

A double click of the middle mouse button and I can instantly switch between my work laptop and my phone. Interacting with my phone with a keyboard and mouse is surprisingly fast and easy.

I've never heard of anyone having to surrender their hardware, I assume it's a non issue for the vast majority of people.

It’s low probability for many cases but it happens.

The most common scenario is when people conduct business via text/iMessage/WhatsApp/etc on personal equipment. It’s easy to establish that the phone number doesn’t belong to the company.

If you do that for convenience you should have a practice of regularly cleaning up your personal stuff (or work stuff as applicable) periodically. If you have a consistent practice, you avoid exposing your entire personal/work paper trail while avoiding getting tagged for destroying evidence.

Just don't do it, it's seriously not worth the hassle if and when the time comes.

Agreed. I always cringe when I read these threads.

> Surely you would think differently if you were working in a heavily regulated environment with hefty fines and even heftier publicity stakes.

Of course I would, but I don't work in that kind of environment.

If you're using macOS make sure the computer is not enrolled into MDM.

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