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Comment by raw_anon_1111 | Hacker News Reader

I’ve worked remotely for 5 years did three companies - two of those allowed Macs. Both would just express ship me a new laptop if I had an issue.

I wouldn’t be surprised if my current company - a third party AWS consulting company - wouldn’t just buy a laptop from Apple on their corporate account and tell me to pick it up from the local Apple Store and ship my old one back to the company.

That’s how I got my original one when I first started

Amazon - the first company I worked for remotely - had me use my own personal computer and log in to corporate approved internal AWS Workspace with the same software as they image their Windows computers until my Mac shipped. They would have done the same if I needed a replacement.

As far as installing drives, Thunderbolt is more than fast enough to use any external hard drive

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Those laptop provisioning experiences sound great. I too found myself working from & deploying software to AWS Workspaces - cloud VDI seems like a great solution for a lot of businesses.

My remote work journey started with IBM in 2015. A few team members got Macs while the rest were issued beefy ThinkPads. It was one of the first large organizations I've seen that intentionally chose not to use Active Directory for their PC fleets. Unsurprisingly, IBM had IT service centers globally distributed. Despite the wider availability of service centers, I also installed extra storage and RAM myself on that ThinkPad.

It's great that remote work has taken off especially since Covid-19.

Active Directory works with Macs. Amazon used Active Directory for their employees across Macs and Windows. They also had their own MDM software. Now we use a combination of GSuite and Rippling (a YC company) for our IDP/MDM software.

Thanks for sharing about Rippling. I'll take a closer look at it: https://www.rippling.com/device-management

The other company I've worked at that chose not to use Active Directory was Tenable. They even acquired a company that specializes in AD security, but ended up deciding AD was too insecure for their IT infrastructure.

Rippling can also serve as a “PEO”.

https://www.rippling.com/products/hr/peo

If you work at a small company, HR, benefits, tax reporting is handled by Rippling as if you are their employee even though for everything else is handled by your employer. You are “co-employed” by both companies. As our company grew, last year we all got “terminated” by Rippling (initiated by our company) and had to “re-apply” to our company as far as new tax forms.

Nothing changed day to day. It was merely an accounting, legal, tax thing.

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