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Comment by lock-the-spock | Hacker News Reader

> As many as 70 percent of laptops sent from companies to remote workers are never seen by companies again, Muneer Mirza, AWS' end-user compute general manager, claimed to The Register.

This seems quite an absurd claim. I can't find any counter data but this number is so high it can't possibly be true.

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I would be willing to believe it, but only with the caveat that the companies tell employees to just keep the hardware.

I've known of at least one company that would tell devs to keep their old equipment that cycled out as a perk. I've also known quite a few IT teams that basically don't care about a 3-4 year old Dell/HP/whatever and are just as happy to have you keep it as they are to ship it back, wipe it, and recycle it.

I wonder if the difference here is whether the employer buys laptops outright or leases them. If they lease they surely need to get them back or pay a penalty. If they’ve bought them outright then it’s hard to imagine it would be cost effective to pay for someone to return a 4 year old HP laptop. Shipping plus labor to wipe it would have to exceed the value of most “business” laptops.

Yea. Did the same. Anything older than 3 years we would give them the option to keep or donate to their local schools. Ofc, we would make them sign documents that we will not support these machines any longer, so we would cut liability instantly.

The buy cheap models in bulk, claim tax deductions and write them off after a few years. They’re probably paying less than $500 for a laptop your average wage slave. Some of them would probably cost more to dispose of than they’re worth.

That has not matched my experience at all, either.

Sure, some laptops never seem to make it back, but generally, their last paycheck isn't released until the gear is back and checked.

That's illegal in the US [1] and it's just the same in Europe. You can't go and withhold payment for work done - what you can do is file a claim in small claims or civil court, depending on the worth of the laptop.

[1] https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/hr-...

Yes, that's illegal, but a good chunk of my lay-off severance pay -- which was about 45 days later -- was subject to me sending my laptop back.

They didn't ask for my monitor or my polycom though.

Severance pay is not last-paycheck pay. Paycheck pay is for work already performed. Severance is (in the US) generally down to agreement between an employer and employee (and the employer normally dictates the terms because the employee in most cases lacks a bargaining position) or as a way to comply with laws mandating notice periods for layoffs.

Beyond returning your laptop, severance pay has a few more strings attached, like waiving your right to sue. But, everything is negotiable.

> That's illegal in the US [1] and it's just the same in Europe.

Wage theft is illegal in the US but is extremely popular, profitable and largely goes unpunished.

https://www.epi.org/press/wage-theft-costs-american-workers-...

By dollar value it is the largest category of theft in the USA, more than robbery, burglary, embezzling, all that stuff. And yet it barely even gets talked about, even though the perpetrators are in plain sight. Meanwhile someone breaks into a house to steal some ipads and gets 10 years.

I've never seen it and I've managed teams for 35+ years now.

To be fair, 99% of the emps just return the gear. It's only a few chuckleheads, and in the end, they kept the gear and the employer kept the check.

I'm not arguing your interpretation, I'm simply stating that it doesn't happen like that in the real world.

My partner just got a new thinkpad for her part-time job in germany at a fairly big science institute and was told that she can keep it when her job is done. I was suprised too.

Now that's cool. Kudos to the Big German Science Institute!

Everyone needs a computer of some sort to make their way through this world. I refurb old gear and donate it those without for that very reason.

That and I absolutely hate to see working gear go to waste. Yes, it's slow, but I can guarantee it'll be much faster than yelling 1s and 0s out the window. :)

'As many as', suggests there might have been one particular case where that happened, probably due to a complex situation, (small company, pandemic, company going out of business, lack of strong oversight, policies on returning equipment not set in place at the time of layoffs, ect).

Using that one particular statistic to make this point seems like an obvious use of bad statistics. The average or median is probably much more normal, and probably a huge number of computers worth a good chunk of money, but it doesn't sound that eyecatching so they choose to go with this particular number.

Agreed, "As many as" is doing some heavy lifting. The only anecdotal evidence I have in support of this claim is how some companies included the employee's laptops as part of severance packages throughout the "forced RTO" layoffs in the past year.

Even if it were true though, look at Amazon Workspaces prices. 4 vCPUs, 16 GB RAM, 10GB of user storage and 80GB of root volume storage, $876/yr.

I think you can get a 4-core laptop with 16GB of RAM for $876 + $195 for the client, and afford to lose it at these prices; unless somehow your turnover rate is obscene; or you are an industry with extremely high security needs.

Costco has a Lenovo IdeaPad 1, 4gb RAM, decent low end CPU, 1080p screen and 128GB MMC onboard for $149.99.

If you void the warranty by opening the back, you can supposedly add an 8GB DIMM and M2 drive of your choice. Aside from GPU heavy work that you won't get with the Amazon solution either, would hardly cost much more.

What are the actual performance characteristics of the vCPUs? I had a farily awful experience at my last job...

My 4 cpu virtual desktop was virtualbox emulating a xeon form 2010 w/16gb of RAM. Loaded with monitoring software. Barely useable.

No 3d accelleration. It choked whenever I tried to run high end software like, well, Figma.

Paid 699€(inc. 24% VAT) for 12th gen i5 4+8 core ultralight Lenovo with 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD... And that wasn't even special deal.

So without tax a real laptop would be quite a bit cheaper.

I think the preceding sentence has some important context.

They're specifically talking about businesses with high employee turnover, like call centers:

> Amazon said its thin client targets businesses with high employee turnover, such as call and payment processing centers, where AWS customers say it can be hard to recover expensive, work-issued devices.

Something like 80% of all stats are made up on the spot

84.2% of stats are more likely to be believed if they include a decimal point

84.27% of stats are even more credible with double digit decimal point.

Except if they contain rounding errors.

too many decimal points just look fake though, so it's a fine line

84.000000001% of all statistics are calculated using IEEE floating point numbers.

84.2% of the time, this is true every time.

Especially vendor statistics about how useful their product is, how much money it's going save you and what the performance is.

I usually ask for proof of such claims. That makes the first vendor call interesting.

Well, the effort required to get a laptop back from a different country is in almost all cases more expensive than what the thing is worth. Even MacBook Pro's are barely worth half the original price after 2-3 years (particularly with Apple's pace of innovation), and most Windows laptops literally fall apart at the hinges at that point so they're worthless anyway.

Yes, you can theoretically go and iCloud-lock the thing to make it worth even less, but the machine still has value for its (non-serialed) parts.

My partner works for a company that uses thin clients to aws instances and they get about half of the hardware back. They don’t even attempt to get the monitors back.

I got a MBP from Goldman Sachs and when I left they refused to pay for mailing it back, which was irritating because it's also activation locked to their IT systems and is therefore useless to everyone. I would say that not all companies want their obsolete client systems returned to inventory.

in that locked condition, does it hold value as a trade in?

No it's worthless. If you trade in a computer to Apple and it's enrolled in any kind of locked thing (like Find My) they'll send it back to you.

I know two people issued remote computers; a desktop and a laptop. They were not asked for them back and one was a MacBook Pro.

Yes. And if that's internal AWS statistics then I am moving my stuff out of AWS very quickly.

My initial reflex reaction is to think the same: however, when I consider what the process would be, I can see a lot of large businesses just not seeing it being worth it to track down and retrieve company hardware from an employee who left under negative circumstances. Most laptops, especially issued to lower rungs of employees, aren't new, and even when they were, weren't high-end machines to begin with: they're probably the bottom tier really, whatever Dell or HP were selling at clearance prices when IT had extra budget.

So let's pick a number out of a hat and say a laptop was $500 new, and for the sake of argument, let's say it was brand new when issued to a problematic remote employee several states away. This employee eventually gets canned for bad performance and doesn't ever ship back the computer: now what? Well, you have to spool up your legal division and arrange for a certified mail letter to let the employee know of their obligation, and see that it's delivered so the employee can't claim later they were never told. Then, you'd probably have to arrange for some company representative to actually go there and attempt to recover it in person, for similar reasons. If that doesn't work (and IANAL so this is just theory) you'd end up either involving their local law enforcement and probably your own to recover stolen property, OR going to small claims court against the employee. You'd have to have paper work in order showing when the laptop was purchased, what it's worth now to recover, and it's probably an open and shut case really to get it done, but then... you get a laptop back, or the cash value of it which is probably nowhere near what the company paid for it, and if it was sold off or junked or otherwise ruined and you DO get a cash settlement from court, well, now you have to COLLECT that which is it's own can of worms, especially if this employee is really pissed off with your organization.

Every step along this involves your legal team, which consists at least partially of lawyers, who are expensive to have work on it. This will be labor intensive, not step by step but over the long haul: instead of a big job, it's tons and tons of little small annoying ones.

AND: If the employee wants and I can't think of why they wouldn't, they could easily go to the media and vilify you for shit-canning them and then suing them. And sure, the facts of that would be obviously vindicating, but how many people read past headlines? Corporations fucking over working people is (rightly) hot news lately.

So like, yeah that sounds high, I wouldn't be shocked if it wasn't that high. But also I wouldn't be shocked if faced with all the fuckabout to get a shitty laptop back from an ex-call center worker or whatever, most companies just don't give a fuck and write it off like they would any other lost asset.

Agree. An unreturned laptop that's more than a couple of years old is not worth the effort to chase down (unless maybe it was something very high-spec). The bigger worry would be any remote access to company resources that is configured on the laptop, but hopefully you've been smart enough to be able to revoke that without access to the remote device.

And even with a high end machine... it's still dubious. It's much, much easier to just write it off like you would any other property lost/damaged/destroyed in the process of doing the job, and it's an aspect of business that more or less every company will already have processes setup for.

You've probably already depreciated most of it on your books, so the write off is pretty small.

After 3 (tax) years a 2k laptop is likely only worth a few hundred dollars to you anyway, and you'd have to pay shipping (50 ish?) so not much there to get worried about. Obviously this depends on tax jurisdiction.

Put it another way, to the company losing that laptop is likely less of a problem than paying out a owed vacation day with ambiguous records.

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