[samjbobb]

I think this is reasonable advice, in some settings. But for many of us, I think it’s just not practical anymore.

The lines have become too blurred. I work from home, I have one office and one desk. The computer on the desk was purchased by my company but other stuff wasn’t like my mouse or my iPad. I have work Slack on my phone, which is my personal phone. I know I should be, but I’m just not that careful anymore about what I do where.

Granted, I work for a startup. It’s a MBP they had shipped directly from Apple to me. I set it up and configured it myself.

The GitHub Balanced Employee IP Agreement acknowledges that this distinction is arbitrary and unhelpful:

> In California the main difference made by BEIPA is that IP developed with company equipment or relating to the company's business, but in an employee's free time and which the employee is not involved in as an employee, is not owned by the company (but the company does get a non-exclusive and unlimited license if the IP relates to the company's business). This recognizes that from the employee perspective, segregating one's life activities based on ownership of devices at hand or relatedness to an employer's potentially vast range of business that an individual employee is not involved with as an employee imposes significant cognitive overhead and often doesn't happen in practice, whatever agreements state.

- https://github.com/github/balanced-employee-ip-agreement

I hope that more employee agreements move this direction so we can stop trying to enforce this distinction.

[sjfidsfkds]

If your employer wants you to have Slack on a phone, they should buy you a phone. That’s been my situation across multiple employers for 5+ years.

I plug the same monitor and mouse into a work computer and a personal computer. This isn’t hard - you can use a single dongle with all of your inputs so you only need to swap one plug. Or you could use some kind of KVM switch.

I understand that startups may not want the expense of buying hardware for their employees, and you might not want to buy your own laptop, but if you end up building something valuable in your personal time, it’s in your interest to keep these things separate. For example, you might work on a side-project which is somehow related to your employer’s business, and eventually decide to quit and start your own company. You’ll be in a more secure legal position if you used your own device for that. You might judge that you aren’t likely do do that, but you should think through the trade-off.

The GitHub agreement sounds like an improvement, but most companies don’t use it. I’m not sure how well it protects your interests. If you’re working at odd hours because you’re receiving notifications on a personal device, while you’re also working on your side-project on a work device, would lawyers agree on what is personal and what is work?

[stock_toaster]

> If your employer wants you to have Slack on a phone, they should buy you a phone. That’s been my situation across multiple employers for 5+ years.

I wholeheartedly agree with computers/systems, and keeping things separate there.. but two phones? Who wants to carry around two phones just for staying on top of slack during _off hours_?

If the company isn't ok with me using slack on my personal phone, then I'll only use slack on the supplied computer during business hours (eg. they get no mobile slack out of me at all). Either that or I find a different job. Life is too short to deal with so many devices and the hassle of it all.

[mike_d]

> If your employer wants you to have Slack on a phone, they should buy you a phone

...and if you want to have personal stuff on a laptop you should buy your own.

[alkonaut]

I think most of us are in the situation that our employers don’t explicitly want us to have Slack/Teams on our phones. They want us to be available.

Slack/Teams on my (personal) phone means I can run an errand in the middle of the day and still be available. I’m happy to use my personal device for it. The alternative is having much less flexibility.

If my employer expected me to be available outside office hours or when not at my computer it would be a completely different story. Like if I was on call. Then I’d demand they pay for my smartphone too.

[rtpg]

OK so they buy you the phone.

Shouldn't the thing _actually be_ "if they want you to have Slack on your phone, they should pay you for availability during off hours"? The phone buying is a basically one-time cost from their perspective.

[sharken]

Very much agree, a phone should either be for personal use or work.

With 2FA being more common in the workplace it just makes sense to have that on the work phone.

[grillvogel]

ive got a wireless mouse and keyboard that support multiple devices, so i dont even need to swap the plug. to use my personal computer i just switch the monitor input and the mode on the mouse/keyboard.

[winrid]

> "It's just not practical anymore."

HARD disagree. Use a separate personal machine and a KVM switch or hub/dock.

I work from home, and I just switch machines. I also have cut off times for when I am allowed to do personal things vs work.

The more you mix play and work, the worse both end up being.

[moooo99]

> HARD disagree. Use a separate personal machine and a KVM switch or hub/dock.

This! Especially with Thunderbolt being widely available n high end machines, switching between computers is easier than it ever was. I have a work Windows machine and a personal Macbook. Switching from work to personal system is a matter of unplugging and changing a single cable.

[astockwell]

FWIW, with JAMF, your employer can ship it straight from Apple to your door, and still get their MDM all over it the second it connects to the internet the 1st time.

[rand49an]

I understand this sort of thing pisses people off but Windows Autopilot and automatic enrolment into Intune has been an incredible help this last year.

Where I work we managed to ship thousands of laptops to students homes from the manufacturers during lockdown and but still ensured that they had the correct E-Safety software and configurations on them when they turned them on for the first time.

[GekkePrutser]

Apple DEP (== Autopilot) on Mac can still by bypassed by simply not connecting to the internet when going through the setup wizard.

On iOS however, it can't. iOS won't let itself activate without internet.

[Terretta]

Any product leveraging the built in MDM hooks can do this, no need to single out JAMF.

[jjav]

> FWIW, with JAMF, your employer can ship it straight from Apple to your door, and still get their MDM all over it the second it connects to the internet the 1st time.

How would that work?

[varispeed]

Do you charge your company for desk space at your house?

It's not being talked about much, but since companies are okay paying landlords billions, they seem to be shy to pay their employees for use of their homes as offices.

[Sebb767]

> Do you charge your company for desk space at your house?

Do you charge your company for your commute to the office?

I can see where you are coming from, but charging the company for office space in your home is a bit over the top IMO - paying for the setup should be sufficient. Additionally, working from home comes with time and money savings for you (unless your answered "yes" to the question above), so it's not like they're using your space with only disadvantages to you. Lastly, renting out the space in your office might come with further drawbacks, as the company could demand more control of the space it is paying for.

[underbluewaters]

When I had a sizable house in an affordable area using a home office felt like a blessing. After moving closer to the office and renting in an expensive area this past year has been... difficult. I'm essentially paying 800/month in rent for the space my wife and I have been working out of.

I can weather this as a temporary pandemic measure but for some of my early-career colleagues it's a very serious burden.

[falcolas]

I don’t, but with the mandatory work from home last year came a nice office setup stipend.

[dorian-graph]

> I think this is reasonable advice, in some settings. But for many of us, I think it’s just not practical anymore.

I too disagree, and aside from that, it's such a defeatist attitude.

[robtherobber]

I agree. But I think we need to look at these things even further.

It's sensible to separate the two in principle, but the arguments forwarded by the author seem to ignore the actual substance of the issue here: that people ar not machines that can genuinely do "work" and "play" separately and that employers should not have that sort of power in the first place.

The world we should strive to build is not one where security issues are entirely removed from the equation or where employees become perfectly aligned with their employer's business needs, but one where most individuals of the society lead healthy, fulfilling, meaningful lives.

As such, it's not the employees that should remove their humanity from teh workplace, it's the workplace - the employer - that should be take (many) steps back and allow people to be people.

[loa_in_]

I understand that visual arts or being a writer are considered a different businesses than IT, that's a pretty common sense, but I guess if you're doing a website on a company property where their business is embedded systems this could be qualified as the same business (IT)?