Hacker News Reader

Comment by tome | Hacker News Reader

> What about work tho, do you only work while sitting down in front of your workstation then?

This question is fascinating to me! What form of work requires using a smart phone?

As a software eng something that bothers me is that every single employer that I have worked for has assumed that you would have no problem installing work-related software on your phone.

The most common offender is MFA related software.

I run GrapheneOS on my phone and don't have the Google Play stuff installed. And kind of the entire point of this is that I don't want to run proprietary, closed-source stuff on my phone at all. I also like not having a ton of bloatware/spyware installed by the manufacturer that I can't remove. So anyway, I usually protest and say that I can't, and that if I'm required to use a mobile device for work purposes then I need the company to provide me with one.

Often arrangements can be made by requesting a device that can double for other work related functions. For example, I currently have a work-issued iPad with Okta Verify installed on it that also let's me reach for Safari and do iOS specific dev & testing when needed.

But it does show the creep. Companies just assume that they can request that you use your mobile device for things that you otherwise wouldn't, and that you will have no problem complying. IMO saying either "I don't own a smartphone" or "I refuse to use my personal devices for work related purposes" should be a no-questions-asked accepted position. And while I've yet to be met with hostility by saying that, it is unfortunately such a minority position that it is almost always the first time they've heard an objection.

> IMO saying either "I don't own a smartphone" or "I refuse to use my personal devices for work related purposes" should be a no-questions-asked accepted position. And while I've yet to be met with hostility by saying that, it is unfortunately such a minority position that it is almost always the first time they've heard an objection.

Being at a more security-conscious (or paranoid) company can help in that case: they also don't want you to have work related things (other than MFA related software) on your personal devices, so the incentives align.

I spent a few years as an okta engineer implementing MFA. Sometimes they buy you an MFA device, but most companies just degrade their security by letting you use phone mfa (even using your work desk phone for mfa).

This, of course, is not the fault/problem of the people who refuse to install mfa on their personal device. Good for them.

Definitely. It's just so much easier to have a policy of 'no company data on personal devices' and just hand out the devices people need for their work. Easy to explain to auditors too (think ISO 27001).

For devs and support this means a laptop, and for ops and management a smartphone is usually needed too.

The only reason I have a phone on me when I'm at the office is for school to reach me in case my kid is taken ill or something like that.

I would never put work stuff on my personal phone. Keep those lives separate. I seem to remember a story here a few years ago where someone's company got sued, and they demanded her personal phone (full of nudes and other personal info) for legal discovery because she used it for both personal and work stuff. Don't cross the streams, people!

If [company] needs me to do work on a phone, they need to provide the phone. Then they are welcome to remote-wipe it, install whatever Spyware and LockdownWare they need to, and have it back whenever they want it. I don't care.

Installing an MFA token in your phone is just using a convenient place to keep tokens, not an imposition on you.

Objecting to being asked to keep MFA tokens on your phone is like saying 'where am I supposed to keep this keycard to get into the building? In my own personal WALLET?'

1. I wasn't talking about tokens, I was talking about requiring employees to install software on their personal devices.

2. You don't need to own a wallet to use a keycard.

2FA tokens these days broadly follow TOTP and HOTP standards, meaning you can use any token manager you like to handle them. The iOS password manager even has inbuilt 2FA token support now. You shouldn’t have to install software just for managing corporate 2FA tokens any more than you need to buy a proprietary keyring to hold your desk drawer key.

I agree with where you're coming from, but half the problem is caused by this needless bundling, putting everything on a single device. A cheap used tablet is like $100. Get one just for work junk. Use it when you need it, otherwise forget about it. Having to spend that money yourself to help corporate check some compliance box is certainly over the line of what should be, but depending on how much you'd otherwise have to argue it's perhaps a better use of your time.

In general I find segmenting things across devices a great way of mitigating overstimulation hell. Like most people I've got some trash toilet game I've become habituated to, but I only do so on a particular device that otherwise stays home. If I'm out and about and have to wait for a few minutes, there's zero temptation to pull it out and check in. Also it's simply unable to surveil my movements, as opposed to say trusting the OS permission system plus having to work around its shortcomings with something like an always-on VPN.

> This question is fascinating to me! What form of work requires using a smart phone?

A common one I've seen around is food delivery workers.

Another common one, at least around here, is taxis (we used to call them "radio-taxi" since you called a taxi by dialing to a central and talking with a dispatcher, who talked to the drivers through radio; it's been a while since the bulky radios with long external whip antennas have been replaced with a smartphone app).

Another one I've occasionally seen is power company repair workers, who seemed to use their smartphones both to communicate with their central and to fill service order forms. The same for communication network repair workers (though now I'm thinking, how do the cell phone network repair workers do it? I'm guessing they must have a traditional handheld radio as a fallback).

Wow, I always knew HN was mainly used by programmers and this thread seems to add further anecdotal evidence for it.

For me, as an agency founder, most of my work is communicating with my team and clients. With clients: sharing progress updates, discussing possible new directions or new features, and replying to any questions they have. With team: exploring the solution space for new features, asking for updates, and managing and overseeing work done by developers on a day to day or week to week basis.

My team works remotely on hours of their choosing and their working times span ~14h of a day. Much of the work for me is intermittent and is discontinuous.

I do around ~50-60% of such work using my phone. I find it more convenient and faster than having to go to my workstation.

Is this odd?

No, but it would be odd if you expected your employees to use their own phones for this.

Of course, no where did I talk about my team. This is just my personal workflow.

> Is this odd?

It's odd to me that you want to do all that on a screen and keyboard smaller than a laptop screen and keyboard!

Most FAANG-level software engineering jobs will require being on-call with something like PagerDuty [0]. Though I guess you could get by with using just text message notifications and not necessarily the app.

[0] https://www.pagerduty.com/

In the US that is. Over here on the old continent they thankfully can't pull that stuff because most countries have banned work calls outside of regular work hours.

No, in the EU too and it's legal. They pay extra though <3

Definitely not legal in many of the large economies any more. France, Spain, Italy, Portual, Belgium and Ireland have have all adopted so called "Right to disconnect" laws. In Germany it's not categorically outlawed but employees have no obligation to respond off-hours.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/02/01/right-to-...

May of course be the case that some companies skirt the rules because they are relatively new and awareness might not be there.

I think you are confusing "respond off-hours emails" and on-call. I work in Germany and I'm contractually obligated to respond when I'm on-call.

To some degree you can be contactable when traveling or otherwise away from your desk with a feature phone but only partially. You’d certainly be that quirky person with the odd anti-smartphone habit.

As someone said, MFA related stuff mostly. I also requested a smart phone from work so I could attend meetings while I'm driving to places and so I have a hotspot if I'm in the pager rotation, which I get paid for.

I know some tattoo artists that use their smartphones a lot for discussing ideas with clients, sharing images of their work, etc, via Instagram.

Could in theory be done with a camera + computer, but probably easier with smartphone.

I have most of my best ideas, both work and personal, while running, so I like having a phone on me in order to reference stuff and take good notes before the thought is lost in the ether.

Any development work where uptime is important? Especially if SLA is involved. If your product has issues, the client bothers management and management will certainly want to bother you.

This isn't the answer to your question but 2 factor auth often requires a phone these days especially for tools that require SMS.

The "two factor" that many companies use.

Duo is compatible with dumb phones

Also passkeys, and, very crude but effective, using a browser plugin for TOTP or a compatible password manager on your laptop/workstation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com