Should Employees Buy Their Own Computers?

Local ID10T writes "Data security vs. productivity. We have all heard the arguments. Most of us use some of our personal equipment for work, but is it a good idea? 'You are at work. Your computer is five years old, runs Windows XP. Your company phone has a tiny screen and doesn't know what the internet is. Idling at home is a snazzy, super-fast laptop, and your own smartphone is barred from accessing work e-mail. There's a reason for that: IT provisioning is an expensive business. Companies can struggle to keep up with the constant rate of technological change. The devices employees have at home and in their pockets are often far more powerful than those provided for them. So what if you let your staff use their own equipment?' Companies such as Microsoft, Intel, Kraft, Citrix, and global law firm SNR Denton seem to think it's a decent idea."

Comments

Nah

[ksd1337]

Wouldn't work. The company would always care about its own security.

Re:Nah

[nospam007]

People who bring their own tools are called contractors, not employees.

Re:Nah

[NFN_NLN]

Wouldn't work. The company would always care about its own security.

Agreed.

1. Security
  a. If computers are coming and going without permission how do you know which are from employees and which are rogue systems
  b. If computers are coming and going how do you ensure they aren't a threat for Virii or bots
    i. At least with company sanctioned computers they should have virus scanners with updated definitions
2. Standardization
  a. Whaawhaaa, my xxx isn't working properly; can you fix it: "I NEED IT RIGHT NOW"
    i. Troubleshooting some hipsters 3D floating mouse with alpha drivers for Windows 7 is just a waste of time
  b. Why can't my Windows 7 Home edition logon the domain, no one told me this when I bought it

Re:Nah

[bigstrat2003]

#2 is not an issue if the company sets a policy of not fixing personal equipment, and sticks to it. If they don't stick to that policy, that isn't so much a failure of letting people use their own equipment, but a failure in not having the backbone to make unpopular decisions.

Re:Nah

[SerpentMage]

Obviously you have not worked in the real world...

Ask any car mechanic on who owns the tools... Sure the mechanic does not buy the big and expensive tools. BUT mechanics are expected to bring their own toolbox.

To get my mechanical engineering degree I worked as a tool and die maker. And I had to buy my own tools. Was not cheap...

Re:Nah

[SerpentMage]

Sorry but you are thinking in the box.

It is easy to setup a secure system. In fact I would argue it would be an even more secure system. Namely you create hard DMZ zones. So for examples developers would have access to version control systems, and development virtual machines that run a plain vanilla server environment. Then once it works there the source code imported back into the security zone. In the security zone the code would auto compile and run as per instructions given by the developer.

Imagine that, it would be like cloud computing and I would argue it would be safe safe safe because only a very very small subset of people are allowed access to the critical information.

And if you have to have access to the internal system, then that is why we have things like remote logins...

Re:Nah

[Bob-taro]

#2 is not an issue if the company sets a policy of not fixing personal equipment, and sticks to it. If they don't stick to that policy, that isn't so much a failure of letting people use their own equipment, but a failure in not having the backbone to make unpopular decisions.

That policy would get the admins off the hook, but the lack of support would still be a problem for the organization. Maybe not allowing personal equipment IS the unpopular decision and they DO have the backbone for it :-).

Re:Nah

[coolmadsi]

b. If computers are coming and going how do you ensure they aren't a threat for Virii or bots i. At least with company sanctioned computers they should have virus scanners with updated definitions

In the article, one of the requirements from a firm questioned about it is to have a McAfee Anti-Virus installed.

a. Whaawhaaa, my xxx isn't working properly; can you fix it: "I NEED IT RIGHT NOW"

While not explicitly mentioned in the article, it is hinted that they have some kind of VPN or remote access system (no data on the computers, on accessible through the network, I think the same with programs although this isn't too clear). In the case that they are just using their computer as a client for programs/files on the company network, it would be a bit easier to fix problems with programs than having them installed on the actual machines.

Re:Nah

[mtmra70]

So what do you call a contractor that has their tools provided by the client?

Re:Nah

[otis wildflower]

One step further: pure VDI, where every new employee can login to a virtual desktop (running as a VM on a Big Honkin Server) via their LDAP/AD credentials, and can attach to it over VPN from anywhere. As long as the client is universal (VNC, RDC or Java), it should make things even easier and more secure, especially if you disable USB/optical passthru and virtual disk images for everyone you can.

Virtual desktops with enough cpu/ram for Office and whatever proprietary junk needs to be supported.

IIRC Redhat actually has something interesting in this area, as a result of their acquisition of Qumranet, and while their RHEV product didn't make the cut during my last virtualization evals, it did have interesting VDI stuff that I'd never use for the project at the time.

Re:Nah

[c 0xFF]

The rationale there is usually to make sure they take care of the tools. My brother owned a house painting business. In that industry the workers buy their own brushes. And it makes sense: when he supplied the brushes, they got trashed within a job or two ... leaving them out, not cleaning them properly, and so on. It was unsustainable. I think it even translated to the tools he did supply (paint sprayers, for example), where they took better care of those tools as well.

But I'm not sure this translates well to computers. I don't even trust my IT department to do the maintenance on my work computer properly. Having people maintain their own computers would be even worse.

Re:Nah

[magarity]

Wouldn't work. The company would always care about its own security.

Not only that but the company also cares about support costs. Ask your helpdesk manager how many more people need to hired to support not a handful of corporate images on a handful of corporate spec computers but to support every make and model that everyone will run out to buy. The first day of this new policy, what are you going to do about the people whose local shop $199 beige box came with Vista Home Basic that needs to connect to the corporate network? Sounds like a support nightmare to me.

Re:Nah

[NFN_NLN]

Wouldn't work. The company would always care about its own security.

Agreed.

1. Security

  a. If computers are coming and going without permission how do you know which are from employees and which are rogue systems

  b. If computers are coming and going how do you ensure they aren't a threat for Virii

I stopped reading after you made a tard of yourself. Making up words doesn't make you cooler.

Also, it's fucking Assembly, and you use an assembler to assemble it.

I *kept reading* after you criticized someone for using made up words and then flung around "tard". Being a hippo-crite does make you a douche.

P.S. even I think hippo-crite is lame but the trolls are hungry.

Re:Nah

[camperdave]

Lucky?

Re:Nah

[godefroi]

Been there, done that, performance sucked, and I wanted to kill everyone involved in the decision to do it.

VDI is great for marketing types and noone else.

Re:Nah

[Gerzel]

Not necessarily.

It has its pros and cons.

One big pro that the employee takes the cost of some basic IT infrastructure in their hand. Simply have it as part of the job to keep a working computer. The Employer could dictate minimum requirements and set-up optoins (Though they would probably be best served by giving out a specialized os distro on a CD or USB key, or creating a software suite that is more independent of the employee's computer (ie sandboxed, more because we all know it can't be all). Or they could go the route of conforming to basic server standards to allow employees to log on to their servers as clients and get work done in that model; though that has the draw back of putting the processing hardware back into the employer's lap.

One big con is that the employer has less control about what that infrastructure is and what is on it. The employer has to come to an agreement with the employee (granted this agreement will probably a boilerplate legal document that the employee has to sign or else not be an employee at all) but the agreement still has to be reached and it will end up giving the employer fewer rights when it comes to the equipment.

This first con goes into the second which is if done improperly this means a large loss of security. The employer does have to trust their employee a little more in this model than if the employer provides the hardware, but all employers have to trust their employees to a certain extent.

In the end it comes down to the balance of control, quality, and cost among other considerations. There is no right answer for any general sense of the question and there will not be for most particular versions either. That's called life. Life is part of business. Welcome to it.

Re:Nah

[SanityInAnarchy]

1. Security

Make people responsible for their own security, to the extent that you trust them. In particular:

a. If computers are coming and going without permission how do you know which are from employees and which are rogue systems

Why are you letting rogue people into the building to plug their machines in? And one solution would be to force employees to register their mac addresses.

b. If computers are coming and going how do you ensure they aren't a threat for Virii or bots

By insisting that computers be secure, rather than relying on your corporate firewall. In particular, if you ever allow an employee to take their corporate laptop to a Starucks, and if this was at all a problem, you have already lost.

i. At least with company sanctioned computers they should have virus scanners with updated definitions

So should employees' machines, once they realize they'll get much less support from IT if they run their own personal hardware.

2. Standardization

Different people work better with different tools. Standardize on protocols and formats so you have interoperability, then let people run what they want.

a. Whaawhaaa, my xxx isn't working properly; can you fix it: "I NEED IT RIGHT NOW"

If you need it right now, you walk down to the helpdesk and pick up a loaner laptop and pull your presentation from the network. Then you fix your own machine (with or without help from IT) when you have time.

i. Troubleshooting some hipsters 3D floating mouse with alpha drivers for Windows 7 is just a waste of time

What makes you think IT would be responsible for that?

b. Why can't my Windows 7 Home edition logon the domain, no one told me this when I bought it

Too bad. Provide a buying guide for the user, and let them take their machine back.

Why do you need their personal equipment logging onto the domain anyway? None of the workplaces I've been in recently have had a Windows domain at all, and two of them were running pretty much entirely online by the time I left.

Re:Nah

[eviljolly]

There's no need to get a condescending tone about it. There is nothing "obvious" about it.

I have worked corporate IT, small business IT, and at one time ran my own business. There are many jobs where you are expected to have your own tools, but it varies from employer to employer. Most respectable companies supply their employees with everything they need. It's usually the mom n' pops or startup companies that force employees to buy their own stuff. The shop I bring my car to supplies tools for all of their mechanics. This makes it very easy to hire new techs, and makes sure that they have everything they need to do a job properly.

When people buy their own tools it can affect the quality of work being done. If you buy cheap tools, you will undoubtedly have more problems getting things done than someone with ones that have all the bells and whistles. With computers this is especially true.

Staying on the topic though, here's an example. Let's say Bob has a new laptop with the latest processor, 6 gigs of RAM, and a solid state drive, while Bill is working on a 4 year old mid-range laptop. If they both work at the same speed, Bob will get more done. It is the best interest of the employer to put up the money for better equipment. So what is an employer going to do in this situation? Do they upgrade Bill so that he can be more productive? That's not fair to Bob who already spent a lot of money on his laptop. What happens if one of their laptops breaks and they cannot afford to fix it; are they out of a job? In grading productivity do they account for their machine's speed? There are just too many problems with this system.

It's easy to say "life isn't fair" and chalk this up as another thing that is "just the way it is", but I think that's one of the many things wrong in the world today. Everyone deserves an equal chance, and it shouldn't be about how expensive of a laptop you can buy, because then some of the best and most productive workers will be out of a job. To me, that is a completely idiotic way to run a business. Your personal equipment should not affect your chances of landing a job.

Re:Nah

[WCguru42]

So what do you call a contractor that has their tools provided by the client?

A consultant.

Re:Nah

[DragonWriter]

People who bring their own tools are called contractors, not employees.

Incorrect. Using your own tools is one of the indicators that is looked out in resolving whether someone is an independent contractor or an employee, but its not the most important.

OTOH, for regular employees, the cost of tools you are specifically required to purchase for a job is essentially a negative part of your wages under the FLSA, which may have FLSA impacts (for low-paid employees, it may bring them below the minimum wage; for employees in potentially-exempt job types where the exemption has a minimum wage threshold -- e.g., the $455/wk or $27.63/hr exemption threshold for computer-related professions -- it could bring them below the threshold for the FLSA exemption.)

Re:Nah

[Lashat]

To make the Car Mechanic to Office Contractor an apples to apples comparison. See Below.

The company in both instances is protecting it's resources.

The repair shop gets tired of losing tools to mechanics so it forces them to provide their own.

The office shop gets tired of losing tools to contractors so it forces them to provide their own.
______________________

The tap and die shop probably had large machinery you used everyday. Places like that including auto repair shops usually only require your own hand tools.

Re:Nah

[Grishnakh]

Wrong, they're called consultants. Contractors are people who come to work, and use work-provided equipment just like any other regular employee, except instead of being full-time and salaried, they're paid hourly and have an employment contract for 3, 6, or 12 months. There's little difference between contractors and regular employees, except in the terms of their employment; for the actual work, and work conditions, it's pretty much the same except the contractors go home when their 8 hours are up for the day.

Consultants are people who are either paid by the job, or by the hour, and frequently use their own tools, and frequently work at home, or come to a company location for a very short duration.

Re:Nah

[Grishnakh]

Tradespeople != engineers and IT people. They're very different professions. Also, wrenches are much simpler tools than computers. Wrenches and screwdrivers don't interface to company networks, carry viruses, store confidential data, etc. About the closest analogy with mechanics would be the air tools they use, which they connect to the shop air compressor, but that's a one-way connection (by nature of the high-pressure air in the line), so it's not possible for a crappy impact wrench to "infect" or contaminate the shop air system.

I suspect the only reason mechanics typically bring their own tools is because auto tools are both compact and expensive, and if the employer provided them, they'd probably be constantly disappearing. Or, these employers are probably just cheap-ass bastards.

Re:Nah

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

We're not talking about mechanics in a garage.

I think the GP has it spot on. The point of an employment relationship is that the employer provides a certain degree of security for the employee — usually starting with a known compensation package and providing the necessary resources to do the job — thus bearing the overheads and risk themselves. In return, the employer keeps any remaining profits once their commitments to their staff are honoured, even if those staff generate many times their wages in profits.

If the employees aren't getting the security side of the deal but the employer still wants to keep all the open-ended benefits for themselves, then it's not so much employment as abuse.

As the GP suggested, if an employer wants to work with independently capable people without the obligation to provide a safety net, that's fine, but the employer should expect to pay those staff accordingly. This is why contractors typically command 2-3x the hourly rate that similarly capable employees do.

Personally, I think it's unfortunate that for many people, employment is considered the default or even the only possible business relationship. There is really no reason it should be in most industries, but a lot of relatively inexperienced workers and a lot of small businesses have never really considered the alternatives, even if a contractor-client relationship might suit both parties better. I suspect that quite a few social and economic problems in first world countries today might be improved if we focussed less on forcing the idea of employer-employee relationships down every teenager's throat and more on encouraging independent workers who can provide professional services more flexibly (and not just in computer-related fields).

Re:Nah

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Your personal equipment should not affect your chances of landing a job.

For employees, which is the topic at hand, I agree. However, I don't think it's unreasonable for a business that wants to outsource some work to favour someone who has more ability to do that work, whether that comes from having better tools or otherwise. It just means the business should expect to pay more for someone with more ability, which brings us back to the earlier comment about contractors.

Re:Nah

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

So what do you call a contractor that has their tools provided by the client?

A walking tax liability!

In the UK, for example, the infamous IR35 rules for contractors mean that even experts aren't always completely sure when someone might be considered a disguised employee and thus made subject to employment-style tax rules. However, a few acid tests evolved from the early case law, and once you're past things like whether you work fixed hours for a fixed pay cheque, you do get to issues like whether the client provided the resources for the job. (This has been a long-standing problem for people who are genuinely operating as contractors, but start to fall into a grey area with some of the commonly applied rules of thumb; the whole area is currently under review, but only after years of lobbying and a change of government.)

Re:Nah

[CynicTheHedgehog]

Most of that can be addressed with virtualization. A VM on a beefy workstation is better than native on a 4-year old laptop, and it's secure enough provided it all stays within the VM.

And imagine how easy it would be to farm out VDIs with everything pre-built and in a working state. Something broken? Re-download the VDI, log in using your credentials, and wait for all the logon scripts to initialize/personalize your desktop and E-mail.

Re:Nah

[otis wildflower]

I'm perfectly happy doing my office junk in an rdesktop window off my laptop on my linux box, I even get sound. Good enough for corporate work IMO.

Re:Nah

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Swearing at me isn't going to make your position any more convincing.

In any case, the ability to quit only matters if the deal is clear up-front and abuse is not widespread. Right now, abuse of employees by employers is widespread in many industries. In practice, employers usually have significantly more bargaining power than employees when it comes to negotiating contracts and significantly greater legal resources at their disposal in the event of a disagreement later. In the absence of either statutory regulation or employees grouping together to adopt collective bargaining positions (as unions do, for example) there is little incentive for employers not to abuse the arrangement unless they actually have a sense of ethics (or take the unusually enlightened view that keeping your staff happy is actually good for business).

Hint: If your contract says one thing about how many hours you will work per week and how much leave you will take, but you are routinely expected to work longer hours or take less holiday for no extra benefit in return, then you are an abusee. In what other part of the legal system is it considered routine or acceptable to outright lie in a binding agreement like that? It's about as ethical as "fair usage agreements", where "fair usage" means "we can advertise using words like 'unlimited' but do not in fact have to provide unlimited service". Sooner or later, industries that make a habit of doing this tend to get slapped down by the advertising regulators, but employers as a group are rarely subject to the same kind of ongoing scrutiny.

Oh, and by the way, some of us do quit. We become contractors and make a lot more money, or even start our own businesses and then steal the best people from the abusive employers by offering fair employment contracts. And then the abusive employers whinge to the media about how there are never any good people available to hire, and blame it on the global economy or the weather or some other lame excuse in the official statements to shareholders. Unfortunately, as long as most people don't know enough about alternative arrangements like contracting to realise they are being abused in the first place, that abuse will continue, and as usual the people least able to cope with it will be the ones who suffer the most.

Re:Nah

[Z00L00K]

And if the employer can't provide tools for the employees to be reasonably efficient then it's time to look for a new employer.

The money saved on not upgrading equipment/software is soon lost on wasted time.

Re:Nah

[TuFur]

'Ask any car mechanic on who owns the tools... Sure the mechanic does not buy the big and expensive tools. BUT mechanics are expected to bring their own toolbox.' As a young man I was a seamer mechanic in a cannery. We bought craftsman tools...cheap and did the job....My tool box was robbed by some local kids and it cost the company $2500 to replace my cheap tools in 1970s dollars. The company was self insured...So I went through a lot of questioning. Tools are not cheap....If I had Snap-on tools, the price would have been over $4000. In the end, it would have been cheaper for the company to supply my tools. While I was there, I cut product costs by 1/3 through design innovations on the post ww2 American Can Co. syrupers and the Continental can seamers. What was really rude was the fact some workers thought the company did pay for our tools and stole them like pick pockets and thieves they were.

Re:Nah

[grahamsz]

I've routinely had employers that let me buy a new laptop every couple of years and expense it. That way I get something I'm happy with and the get a more satisfied employee.

Re:Nah

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone deserves an equal chance, and it shouldn't be about how expensive of a laptop you can buy, because then some of the best and most productive workers will be out of a job. To me, that is a completely idiotic way to run a business. Your personal equipment should not affect your chances of landing a job.

I'm a tradesman not an IT worker and I don't think they can be compared equally, but here is why I buy my own equipment, far more than required for my job: independence.

Owning my own tools means I get jobs finished when I run into problems that others can't fix. As a result, I get paid a higher hourly rate, not as a tool allowance, but because I am more productive. I also sometimes hire equipment to my employer, sub-contract to other companies on the weekend and do a few jobs as an independent contractor. So I run a part time business on the side, giving me higher earning power and the tax advantages of a business without the financial risk because I still maintain full time employment which pays my bills.

I'm not ready to work my own business full time (I need about another $30,000 worth of equipment and a financial safety net to do that), but I do not fear my employer which makes for a much better working relationship. I won't be the next billionaire but I'll do far better than if I kept myself in slavish dependence on an employer.

IT is different, especially because of NDA's and contracts regarding IP with non-compete clauses etc. I don't mind selling my time but I'd hate for a company to own my ideas. I don't envy you guys. I do some amateur programming but I'll never work for a company that claims ownership of my ideas. My employer likes what I do, most IT workers would probably be sued by their boss for doing the same things. If I was an IT worker I don't think I'd use my own equipment for a boss.

Re:Nah

[Pooua]

Your post is particularly well-thought out, rational and fair. I see far too many people who advocate the idea that whatever the man with the money does is OK, that anything goes in business, that the ability to treat people as one wishes is its own justification. I am sick of people turning business into a Machiavellian slug-fest. It ultimately hurts everyone involved and is a big part of the reason for those so-called "inevitable" market downturns. Many of those downturns--such as the big one beginning around 2008--could be avoided, if companies were concerned about ethical behavior over self-aggrandizement.

It is unfortunate that I often work at a skill level in which my co-workers are willing to scrape the ground for crumbs, as it were. They will spend much of the money they earn just to keep a job, instead of requiring fair compensation for their work and expenses.

Re:Nah

[Another, completely]

Could the company just give each employee $1500 per year (or whatever) for hardware expenses, and let the people decide for themselves whether they want more memory, a bigger/second monitor, or whatever? Certainly wouldn't work everywhere, but in small companies (without bulk-purchasing deals) it might not be more expensive or less effective than cookie-cutter standard workstations for everyone.

Re:Nah

[drhlx]

Presumably this definition depends on the jurisdiction. At least in AU a contractor is as DragonWriter describes. A consultant can either be a contractor or an employee of a company. So typically it goes:

Internal roles:

• casual employee (works less than full time, includes a 'loading' in their base rate to account for not paying them holiday pay, sick pay, long service leave etc)
• part-time employee - same rights as full-time employee, but doesn't work full-time hours
• full-time employee, fixed term - a full-time employee with an end-date
• full-time employee - a full-time employee with an expectation of ongoing employment

Semi-external roles:

• labour hire/temp - internal staff member 'loaned' by a 3rd party e.g. resourcing firm

External roles:

• contractor - individual, usually with specialised skills &/or equipment, which is responsible for OUTCOMES not just effort. However they are often paid on an hourly basis. When they are, they are held to a higher standard of quality/responsibility than internal employees. They usually provide their own equipment, often work from home and typically only charge for directly produce work related to the task at hand.
• company - of course a 'contract' defines the role provided, but usually the people providing the service on behalf of the company are employees of the external company. e.g. IT Consulting firms. They may be contractors etc. There are many advantages to this situation over hiring a straight contractor or any of the internal roles, but the cost is almost always higher due to overheads.

David

Re:Nah

[ewok85]

Exactly - what do you think "get the sack" means?

Re:Nah

[walt-sjc]

No it doesn't translate well to computers.

Do you really want your financial, personal, or medical information on some random idiot's personal machine? A machine (maybe a laptop) that someone's kid uses to download all sorts of crap? What if the machine gets stolen while at the office? Who pays? What about the data? Can you mandate full drive encryption? How do you audit it?

Think of the legal liability.

No, no, it's not a good idea when you think past the initial $$$$ and allure of having a non-sucky work machine. Yeah, a good machine costs a few dollars, but compared to the cost of wages and other overhead associated with an employee, it is fricking stupid to saddle the employee with a crap machine that hinders their productivity. If a better machine increases productivity more than 5% then, as a company, you are insane to keep around a 5 year old machine with a tiny monitor.

We keep most of our clients on a 3 year rotation. The tax laws make it reasonable to do so. We track maintenance costs on systems, and find that as a machine ages, it really does get more expensive to maintain and it costs the company more in lost productivity than it's worth. With rare exceptions, our clients understand this. Tech isn't cheap but not keeping up costs more.

Re:Nah

[phoenix321]

VDI is perfect when you need to roll out 1000 clients at the drop of a hat, when you had not a single client before.

We did it and it's great. All notebooks are can be changed, replaced, rebuilt in seconds. Lost notebooks contain no information, no data, nothing. Newly needed applications can be deployed overnight for everyone without a glitch. If it works for the testers on the VDI terminal server, it will work for all others. No company data leaves the data center except for the screen the employee is actually looking at, which means exporting databases and stealing excel files full of stuff is much less likely and needs circumventing email protections only the admins in the data center far away can control. have In a leak, you at least have the email logfiles, which would help a lot in the following lawsuits.

Deploying stuff to a thousand client machines with probably a hundred tiny little differences and a thousand possible failure scenarios is causing much more of a headache than not being able to work at all when the network connection is down, since the amount of work that CAN be done without the net is small enough and getting smaller.

Re:Nah

[nospam007]

"And it makes sense: when he supplied the brushes, they got trashed within a job or two ... leaving them out, not cleaning them properly, and so on. It was unsustainable."

I guess they were paid peanuts.
Do they throw the cleaning agents in the toilet or in the trash?

Nowadays brushes cost almost nothing. Paying people decent money for cleaning brushes, using thinner or other dangerous stuff that according to the law has to be disposed in special depots for environment reasons, costs much more than buying new ones.

I'd never hire a company that would bill me for cleaning useless, cheap junk.

Re:Nah

[nospam007]

You could print a few "This is a Wikileaks machine" stickers and apply them randomly on unoccupied machines just before the boss makes his round, to make them think twice.

Re:Nah

[esarjeant]

I've been at the other end of the Bob and Bill argument. What happens when Bob actually needs a new laptop (RAM to run a VM in this case) and the fastest laptop in the company has both insufficient memory (which cannot be upgraded) and a processor which is completely inappropriate for virtualization.

The catch here is the company has a spending freeze for the rest of the year and the customer wants it delivered in 3 months. The argument that Bill needs a new laptop as well goes out the window at his point, there isn't any money in the budget to do that.

So in this case Bob happened to have a personal laptop with the memory and processor needed for this work. Ironically, Bill's old laptop broken halfway through this project and he ended up with Bob's old laptop until after the project... at which point Bob had been issued an even older laptop and decided to just keep bringing his personal laptop to work until the company can afford to buy something appropriate for his software development work.

btw, this wasn't a startup or a mom & pop company. At the time they were nearly 1000 employees with 10 offices -- and while today they are a very different company it shows that there is plenty of gray area on this topic. I think companies that prohibit employees from bringing personal computer equipment to work are doing themselves a disservice, but on the flipside of that if employees were entirely responsible for a PC then that would be equally problematic.

Re:Nah

[Roger Lindsjo]

I think all my support call has been because of the corporate standardized setup. Eclipse keeps dying, oh, that is because the new corporate update tool is built on the same platform, and it looks for all eclipse processes and kills them when updating! After troubleshooting an application for a couple of days (every 30 minutes performance would go down by a significant amount for about 5 minutes, it turns out that this is because of the corporate system scanning. After talking to support asking how to prevent this scanning during the few hours needed to run the test I got the answer that the scanning can not be prevented. and since it could not be prevented the issue was considered resolved (they had given me an answer, so what more could I possibly ask for?!?).

Re:Nah

[xystren]

Vista = Nightmare
Home = Bigger Nightmare
Basic = Why don't you kill me now?

I had a small home network with an older home NAS device that used NTLM as it's authentication method. Talk about a nightmare trying to get that to work. Home basic has NTLM turned off by default through a local policy. And guess what, they also don't include any local policy editors with the home install. And to try and track down the specific registry key to disable that policy? Virtually impossible. Nothing worse than finding your knowledge base article that tells you how to fix your problem by modifying the local policy by using the local policy editor which isn't included. All these little things that one doesn't find out until the "shrinkwrap" is broken.

Just ended up wiping the machine and reloaded an OEM XP professional on it (while I upgraded the memory). Was cheaper, less of a nightmare, and knew it would work. In a corporate environment with a users own computer? I doubt I would have had that option... Yes, it would absolutely be a support nightmare.

Re:Nah

[TheLink]

Could the company just give each employee $1500 per year (or whatever) for hardware expenses, and let the people decide for themselves whether they want more memory, a bigger/second monitor, or whatever?

Yes but most employees don't want to decide on such stuff. Their work does not involve deciding what computer hardware to buy, buying it (and probably supporting it - returns and repairs).

Once a company gets bigger than a few people, it becomes more efficient to split up the work to specialists, so someone decides on the computer stuff, someone else does the accounts, another decides on "office supplies" (pens, paper etc), furniture and so on.

Re:Nah

[TheLink]

Huh, just because people don't quit doesn't mean it isn't abuse. That's as stupid as saying that those abused women aren't abused just because they don't leave the abuser.

Just because some people are weaker doesn't mean it's right to take advantage of them.

The ones who are really strong are those who can also take good care of the weak.

Re:Nah

[contrapunctus]

I remember hearing about a company that gives $2,000 towards buying a computer every 2-3 years to each employee but they had to take care of it themselves (ie call with manufacturer warrantee themselves etc). They said IT costs went down.

I'm sorry I don't have a reference I can't remember what radio show it was on.

Re:Nah

[mysidia]

People who bring their own tools are called contractors, not employees.

Execellent cost saving idea... let the employees all bring their own phones, computers, and office supplies, but reclassify them all as contractors.

1099 instead of W-2. No social security paid by the company for the compensation (contractor gets to pay twice). No unemployment fees, overtime, wages, etc to worry about, since contractors don't get those.

Instead employees now contractors get "bi-weekly advance based on portion of the work completed"; they get to pay for their own training, insurance, and since everything's a contract, instead of annual performance reviews, annual contract renewals, no demands for more $$$ on either side until contract renewal, AND no negative connotations associated with negotiating a lower price for the work.

Re:Nah

[rtb61]

The tool argument is completely illogical, tools do not have a memory, tools do not have applications, tools do not communicate, tools do not turn malicious and tools can last quite a long time.

Who owns the data is the biggest problem, the employee owns their computer and thus they own everything on it. The reality is, it is often the software that costs far more than the hardware, so you free open source software as the default.

If you want your employees to look after the hardware better, than let them know they get to keep it when it is replaced at the end of it's taxation life cycle.

When it comes to budgeting the hardware and software, you need to add it to the employees productivity and generate a combined value. Bean counter seem to forget that prior to computers and everyone typing out their own reports you had typing pools, that typed out reports even given to them verbally or hand written. Charts and tables that took days are now down in hours in a spread sheet. Drawings that took weeks are now done in days.

Computers are an overhead with a per employee cost and, a set replacement cycle for hardware, networks and software. To save money try to keep to off the shelf hardware and software, use free open source software, pay attention to consumable (ink, paper) and tie computer costs to productivity gains.

Re:Nah

[Anarke_Incarnate]

3 - Anonymous cowards should read what was written before agreeing with me and making it seem like they disagree.

Re:Nah

[smokin_juan]

because then some of the best and most productive workers will be out of a job.

Why are our most productive workers not able to afford a laptop? Maybe that's the problem.

The god damned score board is broke and the technicians can't afford a laptop to fix the fucking thing.

Re:Nah

[CodeBuster]

What really prevents more programmers from working as independent IT contractors here in the United States are the arcane and outdated US tax codes which contain a 20-part test for distinguishing between who is an employee and who is a contractor. These difficulties are further compounded by a tax code change, inserted into a tax reform bill by the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y. as a favor to IBM. To this day, despite various attempts at repeal, Section 1706 of the 1986 Tax Code makes it very difficult to remain self employed as an independent contract programmer in the United States because few companies are willing to risk a claim by the IRS for back payroll taxes on regular employees who were "misclassified" as contractors. It's not just programmers either, the entire US tax code is in desperate need of reform, especially in light of stiff foreign competition with fewer regulatory burdens and far more efficient tax regimes. It's like US companies and employees are being asked to run a race with parachutes tied to our collective backs. The Chinese and Indians are laughing at us behind our backs.

Re:Nah

[derfla8]

I don't think you brother's painters fork $2000 for enough paint brushes for three years all in one go.

Re:Nah

[nobodie]

which is why companies like IBM use the hell out of contractors. EG: My little brother was on the dev team for the P6 chip, the whole US side of the team (most of it) was contractors with a few management folks to herd the cats in the right direction. There are a lot of reason to use contractors, but efficiency on all levels is high on the list.

Re:Nah

[Compaqt]

Is this simple enough to be appropriate for a home/family server? As opposed to LTSP?

And what kind of resources are required on the server per client?

Re:Nah

[toddestan]

I find it hard to believe. Most people are going to go where they know computers are sold, and you're going to end with a bunch of random machines from Best Buy and Wal-mart. Computers that for the most part, aren't built to the same quality standards as the typical corporate desktop and are harder to repair when they break.

Then you'll have the guys like me who'll order $2000 of parts from Newegg and put it together ourselves. While in the end, this may mean I'll have a better computer suited for my job, in the meantime does the company want me using company time dicking around with a DIY-computer?

Re:Nah

[contrapunctus]

i can only speak for myself, i am much more productive with my own laptop (MBP) than the crippled closed one they gave me wich i can't even change the power management on and so the power button is next to the esc key and i dread hitting it by accident and losing all my work...

Re:Nah

[Neil Boekend]

b. If computers are coming and going how do you ensure they aren't a threat for Virii or bots

By insisting that computers be secure, rather than relying on your corporate firewall. In particular, if you ever allow an employee to take their corporate laptop to a Starucks, and if this was at all a problem, you have already lost.

It isn't a corporate laptop. Its a personal laptop that is being used for corporate purposes. You can't forbid people to take their own laptops to Starbucks.

Re:Nah

[hesaigo999ca]

I have to agree here, especially having been witness to so many counts of work laptops being brought home for the family to use, then coming back unto the work network all scraped and infected....yikes...talk about a nightmare and a half

Re:Nah

[SanityInAnarchy]

I was replying to someone who was suggesting that shouldn't be allowed. The idea was that all work should be done on company machines, and personal machines (like personal laptops) shouldn't be allowed.

My point is that if you allow people to take corporate laptops to Starbucks, you've already lost. If you allow them to plug personal laptops in, you've already lost. By "lost" I mean it's time to give up on the idea that the corporate firewall is going to protect you, and start making sure your network is as secure inside as it is outside -- there's no reason a single infected personal laptop should be an issue for anything else on your network.

Re:Nah

[teknomad]

Let's put a finer point on it. A company can create a virtual machine image for each employee to run in a company-provided VM software (like, say, VMWare) installed on the employee's personal computer. That VM is then a slice of the company's green zone -- they can be as anal as they want about security, can even configure the VM to lock itself down so no cut & paste from the local machine, no access to local drives from within the VM, network from the VM is only via company VPN, etc. etc. -- it is in essence a bubble of the corporate computing estate inserted into a hostile environment (ie, the employee's machine). Now lets look at maintenance and repair. The company can contract with an external service & support provider (like, say, GeekSquad) to provide base level support to all employees -- just "get the VM working again" level of support, which may include ripping out alpha drivers, malware, incompatable apps, whatever the employee has done to hork up their machine. The employee has to agree to let this support crew un-hork their machine...or the company will provide them with a 5-year-old laptop to use that's completely locked down. There's probably some refinement to this model, but you get the picture. Not enough security for you? OK, then put the company VM image on a military-grade USB stick (like, say, an IronKey) -- if it gets stolen, or the employee's machine gets stolen, so what? its a doorstop without a password and/or finger swipe. Now...here's the problem with the model: If you're going to lock down the corporate VM so it cannot interact with the employee's host machine, you're going to have to provide access to the Internet from within the corporate firewall -- and then the erosion of your security begins. Actually, this is the situation we all live with now with corporate images running on corporate machines...it gets no better just because you move the corporate image to a VM. Your employees are going to want to move information into and out of that corporate VM running on their machine -- how do you solve that problem? I think there is an opportunity here for "permeable firewalls" like FaceTime Communication's product -- systems that run alongside VM environments and carefully screen what moves between the host and the guest o/s. The policy should be un-editable by the employee (not hard to do: just encrypt it) and it should be aware of the source of the data (can a system's clipboard tell where its content came from?). Does anyone know if such a product exists yet?

Re:Nah

[badkarmadayaccount]

Resource planner suckage, IOW - blame the beancounters...

Re:Nah

[badkarmadayaccount]

Netboot a thin client to a VM farm terminal sever. Done.

Bad idea.

[commodore64_love]

Having email on your phone, or your computer, gives the company authorization to scan the whole thing including your personal data. That was already ruled in court.

I'd sooner keep my work and life separate, and that includes my gadgets.

Re:Bad idea.

[ksd1337]

Well, after I posted my comment, I thought about that. I'm pretty sure the company could find a loophole and exploit it.

Re:Bad idea.

[TheGratefulNet]

spot on - if you let the company put a pc into your home, its almost always their pc and not, technically, yours. if they lease you a dsl line, that 'own' that link and all that goes over it.

lots of implications of allowing work-bought devices into your home and onto your network.
 

Re:Bad idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

Having email on your phone, or your computer, gives the company authorization to scan the whole thing including your personal data.

You are correct - absolutely (well, depends where you live, but yes in the US it was decided). However, to extend that - what is less than clear is what happens if you are on "Legal Hold". Does your personal computer get impounded? Where I work, we get a lot of lawsuits and there are quite a few folks on Legal Hold which prevents them from deleting related data. Then, if it does go to trial and discovery often devices must be handed over. Folks don't think much about this, but it can be a threat. As far as I have seen (I am not an expert), I don't believe it has been decided yet if your machine could end up as a piece of evidence.

Re:Bad idea.

[Capt_Morgan]

huh... not if it's YOUR property that YOU pay for. You are thinking of company owned equipment.. which of course they can scan.. it's theirs

Re:Bad idea.

[BradleyUffner]

spot on - if you let the company put a pc into your home, its almost always their pc and not, technically, yours. if they lease you a dsl line, that 'own' that link and all that goes over it.

lots of implications of allowing work-bought devices into your home and onto your network.

This story is about the opposite. Using employee purchased equipment to be used for work.

Re:Bad idea.

[joebok]

There are compromises possible. To avoid carrying two mobile devices, I have BES on my personal blackberry. When I telecommute, instead of using a junker laptop that the company would provide, I use a virtual machine on my equipment - I VPN to remote-control my workstation at the office so no data or code is ever local.

From a legal/privacy standpoint, I suppose this might not be ideal should things go horribly wrong - I might be exposing myself to some risk. But I have a good relationship with the company so I am willing to take that risk. And I don't know that it is really that much of a risk. They would just wipe my BB, not confiscate and scan it, and with the abundance of USB and other portable storage devices, I think it would be just as easy for a company to make a case for search/seizure of personal data/equipment in one case as the other. Or to reverse it, it would be just as hard for me to prove I never transferred any inappropriate data from work to my virtual machine/personal physical machines as it would for me to prove I never use a portable storage device to transfer any inappropriate data from work.

That being said, I have no intention of ever working on work things directly on a device that is not owned by and located at the company (i.e. remote in over VPN only) - I never want any client data on any hard drive that could be lost or stolen while in my possession.

Re:Bad idea.

[93 Escort Wagon]

Having email on your phone, or your computer, gives the company authorization to scan the whole thing including your personal data. That was already ruled in court.

With cloud-based email that argument probably wouldn't apply - those arguments were based on the presence of the messages on your device/computer.

Heck, even IMAP might be a decent argument against giving them access.

Re:Bad idea.

[vux984]

huh... not if it's YOUR property

Agreed.

However, as soon as you enter into an agreement with the company wherein you are expected to provide your own computer for work, they are likely going to require that they have SOME control over it. And odds are that 'some control' may prove to be close to 'total control'.

They may need to audit that you have up to date antivirus, they may feel they need to scan it for sensitive documents, licensing compliance, and other company IT/security related stuff. If the company gets sued, they may need to turn YOUR computer over as evidence.

that YOU pay for
Often if they have you using your equipment, you get some sort of compensation. This is usually spelled out in a contract. That contract may contain all kinds of terms and conditions...

Re:Bad idea.

[BitterOak]

Having email on your phone, or your computer, gives the company authorization to scan the whole thing including your personal data. That was already ruled in court.

Citation please?

Re:Bad idea.

[poetmatt]

see though, employee purchased equipment for work is on employer property and connects to it.

so as indicated, the employer can exert control in a variety of ways as a result, not excluding snooping etc etc.

if anything, this whole argument is just a sign that sometimes people don't get PC's as powerful as they need and othertimes you have someone with the latest and greatest who uses a 1 page spreadsheet.

Re:Bad idea.

[hedwards]

That used to be quite common back before the labor movement really kicked off. It was common for coal miners to live in company housing, buy things from the company store, including the tools and gear necessary to complete their jobs. It was also typically arranged in such a way that the cost of the gear was always a bit more than the wages preventing any employee from ever managing to pay off the debt.

This isn't going to cause that to happen, but it is one step in that direction and in my view it definitely requires a significant amount of justification to even consider it.

Re:Bad idea.

[Ganthor]

Agreed,

Big companies will want to protect their data. So using your equipment is a sure fire way to loose your privacy.

Having your own latest equipment has a lot of draw backs too.

You'll have to support and maintain it. You'll have to replace it if stolen or broken, You'll have to allow them to scan it.

My God, I can't think of anything more creepy then bringing my own stuff in to work on and allowing them access to it. Besides, my work does not require I have the latest fastest equipment and mobile phone. Unless I become a 3d texture artist or something, I doubt very much that I'd be any more productive with it. The human brain can only work so fast, and the time we spend waiting for the network, or applications is a good time to think about what we are doing. - Secondly most of my waiting time is network latency, has nothing to do with my desktop speed at all.!

Summary, your nuts if you want to bring your own kit into work. Too many serous implications for you personally!

Re:Bad idea.

[pclminion]

They may not have the right to scan it without your permission, but they can certainly say "Either let us scan it or you're fired."

Re:Bad idea.

[vux984]

If an employee develops code entirely using his own equipment, it is possible for the employee to contend that the development was done on his own time hence all of the code is his sole property.

In most states it will be a short lived case that the employee will rapidly lose.

In fact if you want to develop private code while employed to develop code, the more separation you establish from any "corporate coding" the BETTER.

Re:Bad idea.

[cowwoc2001]

I somewhat get the idea of corporations being able to snoop on your emails when it resides on *their* computers, but what business is it of theirs when it resides on *your* computer?

Using the reverse logic: if my emails happen to reside on their computers, do I get to snoop *their* personal emails too?!

Re:Bad idea.

[Grishnakh]

Exactly. If the company wants you to use better equipment in order to be more productive, then they need to shell out the money for it, and fix their IT operations so that it isn't so cumbersome to get this equipment into employees' hands. If they can't or won't do that, then they deserve to suffer the consequences.

I'm not going to shell out my own money, and put myself in legal risk, just to make myself more productive at my job. If I'm being held back at work by poor management that way, I'll either put up with it as long as they keep giving me a paycheck, or I'll look for a better-managed company (or probably both at the same time). At work, I'm really nothing more than a hired gun, and as soon as it suits them to get rid of me, they will, so I have no incentive to try to do my job better than I can given the tools that I have.

Of course, this doesn't mean you should totally slack off either, because then they would have a very good reason to get rid of you. But if the IT equipment is what's holding you back, you can rightfully point to that problem and blame it for your lack of productivity. You can't point at the fact that you spend 4 hours a day on Slashdot as a good excuse. Your performance is really rated in comparison to all your coworkers, so if they have the same equipment problems, they'll all be held back just like you are, so the company isn't going to single you out in that case.

Re:Bad idea.

[cpu6502]

>>>not if it's YOUR property that YOU pay for.

In a recent court case a woman setup her personal cellphone to receive company email. That worked great until she quit the company, and they demanded the right to scan her phone, and ensure she had not stolen any proprietary information via the email account. The court sided with the company.

Re:Bad idea.

[cpu6502]

See /. archives.

Re:Bad idea.

[vux984]

That sort of control costs my company money.

Indeed it does. And I hear where you are coming from... if you company is so cheap that it won't give you even a half decent PC to use at work, there is no way they are going to pay anyone to make sure you are even running antivirus at home, or to check that you are taking care of your customers data ... or anything else.

And you are right. Until you aren't right.

Indeed, such a company seems particularly ripe for the "getting sued for screwing up its customers data privacy", and resulting in your PC being seized for evidence, complete with your home made pr0n, your family christmas photos, your correspondance with your bank and doctor and insurance company... and getting it all pored over by god-knows-who and stuck in legal limbo for years.

I am far more productive at home with cscope, nvi and CVS than I'll ever be with the authorized tools that crash all the time and were obsolete by the time they were developed, which is far into the past.
We need XP to test the stuff we produce, but we could have an off-net build and test computer for that.
As far as customers' data is concerned, our workstations running XP while on-line with weak passwords and full unrestricted access to our "server" are enough of a threat that letting me install a trusted open source OS with a tiny attack surface can hardly worsen it.

Agreed and understood. But if you are going to supply your own PC to use for work... have a completely separate PC to use for your private life.

Re:Bad idea.

[Phoobarnvaz]

Having email on your phone, or your computer, gives the company authorization to scan the whole thing including your personal data. That was already ruled in court.

I have to agree this is never a good idea...no matter in a perfect world or the one we live in. As you've pointed out...once on the network the company owns...the company has every right to check your equipment. What if you're someone who likes watching girls screwing donkeys in your spare time at home and have all your favorite links in your favorites/bookmarks and haven't cleared your cache. By hooking it to the company network...you've just let the company see what you enjoy outside of work hours. You have child porn on the system because a few stray photos came across the wire...you just got found out. Be ready to become someone's biatch for you are going to jail. If you ever get out...the first stop you make is to get on the sexual registry for your state.

You can keep telling yourself it can never happen...but it can and does everyday. Prime example is when I used to do phone support for a former US OEM. Wives would call up all the time to find out why the computer was running so slow. Because her hubby forgot to wipe the cache/history file on the browser...the wife finds out he's gay or into things she never heard of or imagined.

Re:Bad idea.

[omb]

FIRST, the quoted conclusion is false and unenforceable, if it is yours and the employer breaks in they are guilty of a felony!
If they hack in they are in a world of trouble.

HOW do they break in unless you run WIN-CRAP or give them VNC assess to a 'root' shell. A little help, if I run a SMTP server on my base computer, eg sendmail, and use webmail to that, how does that let them in? If they hack in they are in a world of trouble.

My Laptop has a clear label on it "Property of OMB" and runs Linux not WIN-CRAP and is locked down better than a bulls arse in fly time. If they hack in they are in a world of trouble again.

As a consultant I NEVER connect my hardware to a client's network except at their EXPLICIT request, in writing. When I do, and it dosn't trigger their dumb intrusion detection system I have to give my chargeable "HOWTO rig a Linux system to avoid CISCO et al intrusion detection" or their answer is "Mine to know ..." but you must log this incedent for your security audit.

Networking 101 tells it all, practical advice, make sure your box stays silent until it knows what it is doing, it can easily guess the localnet, it can forge arp packets using that to map the subnet and find subnet gaps to exploit as an available IP address, then it can ...

Lastly, do not permit "password, keyboard" ssh logins to your boxen, set a BIOS password and replace your drive retaining screw with a VERY hard to remove security screw and 'nail varnish' the screw in with very hard to match color, on top not the theads, bit you could use soft Locktite there.

Re:Bad idea.

[scottv67]

>...and go home completely frustrated and hating life.
>...And when they're done, they have to launch the VM on a computer with a whole gigabyte of ram.

Use some of your hard-earned take-home pay to buy some RAM from eBay for your work PC and then kwitcher bitchin. I've done it. It's far better to spend $40 for RAM that will go into your employer's PC than to spend $40 on ACE inhibitors (beta blockers, etc.)

Re:Bad idea.

[Carewolf]

However, as soon as you enter into an agreement with the company wherein you are expected to provide your own computer for work,

This depend heavily on the prevaling business culture. I can't imagine any companies that would do this, or any employee who would accept that, of course I highly suspect it would invalid contract terms where I live, which might explain why it seems like such an odd demand to me.

Re:Bad idea.

[Builder]

Only in America. In most of the world we have protection for employees.

No one can be trusted

[zero.kalvin]

So No.

Fat chance

[Anonymous Coward]

All the projects in your personal computer can be claimed to belong to the company, unless they make agreement in writing. Also, this will create major headache in company's IT and software licensing business.

Personal Life Separation

[0racle]

Do it and you will be happier. So what if your own stuff is more powerful, it is yours and used for your things. Stop acting like a slave and use your own time and devices for yourself.

Re:Personal Life Separation

[Belial6]

Yeah, I should separate my work life and personal life. That way, instead of sitting here and working from the comfort of my home, hearing my son singing in the other room, and enjoying the time we just spent having lunch together, I can commute to an office, leave my child to be raised by someone else. I could have missed out on seeing his first steps, and hearing his first words. I could have some day care provider tell me about it instead of witnessing it first hand. I could have lunch in my cube instead of in my kitchen with my son. Instead of taking the 6 week road trip that I took with my wife and son last summer, I could have spent that time in a little cubicle and seen my son for a couple of hours a day between the time I got home from the office, and the time that he needed to go to bed.

I would get all the benefits of missing out on my family AND could proudly say I wasn't a slave. Your suggestion doesn't solve the problem that you think it does. The problem is when work takes part of your personal life without offering a reasonable exchange. The fact is that work life by it's very nature is taking away from your personal life. If you have an employer that doesn't respect your personal life, they are not going to respect it when you separate work from personal. All you will end up with is less personal life, because you are still going to have to do the work. So, the only way to keep them separate is to not include any personal.

The total separation of work and personal life is dandy for those that don't really want to interact with their spouse or children. Me, I like mine.

Re:Personal Life Separation

[Frosty Piss]

Do it and you will be happier.

And, I wonder if this is the same company discussed in an "Ask Slashdot" yesterday that wants their employees to work 10 hour days 7 days a week without overtime?

Re:Personal Life Separation

[towermac]

Finally, one that "gets it". (I see excelsior gets it too). This revolution is moving fast folks, and I'm afraid it's going to catch a lot of us by surprise in the not too distant future. Prior examples off the top of my head: Typesetters, printing guilds, the ability to read and write... (all illegal at some point in history even, for some of us, not so long ago).

So, they're not going to NEED us anymore. Or, has that already happened? Hard to tell when you're right in the middle of it. But make no mistake, we are right there in it.

I'll cut to the chase quick. What "systems" your company really needs to do business will be public facing. I also think thats less systems than you think it is, but whatever. As important as the company's payables file may be, the company doesn't hire a file or a machine; they hire an accountant to be responsible for the company's payables. A sales manager to be responsible for sales, shipping manager types to be responsible for inventory, etc. Are you getting it? 'Cause to be honest, I'm having trouble wrapping my head around where it's going to end up. That payables file is still going to hosted on some box, somewhere, ... along with the handful (on the internet, it's a handful if that) of other data your company has. Do they really need this giant IT Dept. for that? I think not. Employees will still need end user support, as people always have and always will to some degree. And it will be convenient for a company to have someone on staff that can quickly help with problematic excel files, bastard projectors from hell, busted printers...

but. The IT Dept. as we know it today is already an anachronism.

Re:Personal Life Separation

[JaredOfEuropa]

That depends on the company.

One of my current clients is very flexible in the way I arrange my work. I can work from home, and there's no issue with me running all manner of personal errands during work hours, as long as I make up the time and (more importantly) deliver what I promised. I do some idle surfing during office hours as well, and no one cares. They know that most people do some work-related surfing at home as well anyway.

This company is very much into the idea of allowing people to use their own hardware for work. Not as a cost saving measure, but to allow people more choice. Already I can get my corporate mail and calendar on my personal iPhone, which is a huge time saver. When I work from home, it's on my own box even though the company is happy to provide me with a laptop. So, everybody wins. And when I am at home, I have no trouble switching off. My co-workers often work in the same way, and they are very careful about invading someone's personal time, which rarely happens.

Oh, and this client isn't some hipster dot-com startup, it's a well-established, traditional megacorp. They just happen to have some enlightened managers and IT guys, providing one of the better jobs I've worked on in my professional life. In contrast, I heard about this German firm the other day, taking a very old-fashioned approach to separating work and personal time. A strict 9-5 regimen, be on time and leave on time, no personal calls or surfing on the job whatsoever, and no ability or permission to access work files after 5. I'd hate to work for a company like that.

Re:Personal Life Separation

[Culture20]

That payables file is still going to hosted on some box, somewhere, ... along with the handful (on the internet, it's a handful if that) of other data your company has. Do they really need this giant IT Dept. for that?

Yes. The Cloud is not magic. You may lose the young nerds that clamber under your desk to replace bad RAM, but you won't replace 90% of IT (programmers, sysadmins, network admins, phone guys, DBAs, ...)

Re:Personal Life Separation

[Thing 1]

It all depends on what level of risk is acceptable in your life.

Re:Personal Life Separation

[Belial6]

Of course it doesn't ring. Your sitting in a cube in a completely different building than your wife.

Re:Personal Life Separation

[oldmac31310]

I'm getting divorced, you insensitive clod!

Re:Personal Life Separation

[Anonymous Coward]

The total separation of work and personal life is dandy for those that don't really want to interact with their spouse or children. Me, I like mine.

What a false dichotomy. Separating work and personal life doesn't mean becoming a cubicle rat -- it means understanding boundaries. My home computer and personal cell are much newer, nicer, and faster than my crappy work-issued Pentium M laptop and Blackberry 8300. But when I'm working (and 4 out of 5 days -- that's at home) I use my work-issued ones, and my personal devices are left idle. On those work issued machines, the company can tell me whatever policies they want and I won't care. They want me to run a bloated, full-blown "security" suite, plus TWO custom auditing scanners? Fine -- their system; their policy -- I don't care. They want to see and audit my phone calls and texts and data on my Blackberry? Sure, go ahead -- again, they paid for it and the phone plan -- so I don't care if they want to check how I use it.

But when my work day is over (which is strictly 9-5), those shitty devices are put away and my personal devices get used exclusively. When I take the family out to dinner, or an outting, or vacation, I have no contact with work, and I get to enjoy using own laptop and cell. And no one ever gets to tell me what to install on them, or how I may use them.

I honestly do not see ANY benefit to using my own devices (assuming all else being equal) instead of the company-issued ones.

Re:Personal Life Separation

[maitas]

I'm really happy for your life. I really would like to have the same kind of work you do, but there is a limited supply of that kind of work. If we all work like you, there wouldn't be any one to get my BigMac, nor to get my money on the banks, etc.
Nevertheless, I'm aiming at your kind of work.
One more thing, "The total separation of work and personal" might be a good choice to some, but to others there is no choice.
Work is whatever you have to do to get from nature the things you need to keep on living.

Re:Personal Life Separation

[Belial6]

Your right it's a false dichotomy. For example, you talk about setting boundaries, even though you DO mix work and home life. The fact that you are using electricity that you bought in a facility that you pay for is a very large mixing of personal and business life. Giving up space in your home is a far bigger use of personal resources than a computer.

For you, the boundary is your phone and computer. From your description, it sounds like your employer would abuse those if they had the chance. I don't set that boundry. My employer could call me at 2 in the morning and tell me to drive the 1.5 hours to the office, and I would do it. The number of times they have done this in the last 10 years? 0. That means that if they did, I could be sure that they were not doing it just for convenience, but because there was a real emergency. In exchange, I don't have to ask, or even tell them if I have a middle of the day appointment.

You actually argue in favor of my point, even if you don't realize it. Your deal is better than the person that cannot use their personal home for work use. My deal is better than yours, as I don't have to dedicate extra space in my home to a company computer. I also don't have to install anything special on my system other than VMWare, which I have installed anyway.

Beyond that, as the poster below says, it is great that you and I have really sweet deals with our work, but those jobs are limited in quantity. Many people don't have a choice when it comes to putting limits on work, and for others, the separation really does mean becoming a cube rat.

Heck, if it were not for the threat of massive lawsuit, many wouldn't even have the ability to separate work and having sex. The labor laws pretty well prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that employees frequently don't have a choice.

Re:Personal Life Separation

[gullevek]

And who implements those magic Cloud stuff? Setup the mail accounts, fileserver stuff, new PCs, Firewall, VPN, etc? Do you think they will all be done by magic monkey elves from happy fairy Google land?

Even if you put all your file and mail into the cloud, someone needs to maintain that too. On the server side, at the cloud provider, and at the client side, the customer.

And IT Dept is not a type setter or a horseshoe maker ...

Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[Skarecrow77]

That's just what I want, to support 30 or 40 different models, brands, or hell even architectures.

To say nothing of when their own personal laptop that they used to surf horse porn last night brings some nasty viruses to work to test the corporate network.

And finally, what happens when I tell them "Sorry, you're going to need to downgrade your os/office suite/creativity suite/whatever to be compatable with the tools we've already paid thousands of dollars for and aren't going to get a new license just for your special snowflake hardware there".

No thanks. I'm happy with standardized hardware. if you keep facebook and yahoo messenger off it (thank god for corporate virus protection that can prevent unauthorized installers/msi files), it'll run nice and quick.

Seriously, a 5 year old pendium D with 2gb of ram running XP will tear the fuck out of office 2003 or 2007. This is work. Do work.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[spidercoz]

Seriously, a 5 year old pendium D with 2gb of ram running XP will tear the fuck out of office 2003 or 2007.

True, but it'll probably burst into flames in the process.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[jeffmeden]

Seriously, a 5 year old pendium D with 2gb of ram running XP will tear the fuck out of office 2003 or 2007. This is work. Do work.

Oh, what I would give to be able to get everything done with Office 2003 or 2007! As it is, my PDF viewer has to fight over the virus scanner, 2 firewalls, IDS, "policy manager", and probably a tattletale program or two thrown in for good measure by the IT guys who want their 10 or so lives to be simple at the expense of the simplicity of the 1000 users who have to fight their computer to get it to do what they want it to.

Hey, at least browsing Slashdot is nice and fast! Maybe that's why it's so damn addictive.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[Skarecrow77]

Perhaps you need to have a discussion with your requisition department? or pen a nice letter to the VP of IT. Go over people's heads. the majority of people can get by just fine on a dual core processor of virtually any type (or even a fast single core) if they have enough hard drive space, their ram total isn't gimped, and the OS isn't bloated all to hell. Virtually every single "my computer is too slow" issue I've ever worked on has had add/remove programs, ccleaner, malwarebytes, and msconfig as the major improvements, with only stupid configurations like xp on 512mb of ram or less as the exceptions.

If, on the other hand, you actually require good hardware to do a technical job, such as 8 or 12gb of ram to run multiple VMs or hardcore cpu power to render or edit video, i.e. demanding apps that can utilize multiple cores, then by all means you should have your hardware. That's a failure on your company's part. Good hardware isn't THAT expensive. a kickass rendering station can be had for the price of maybe two "joe blow" stations. Somebody can sign off on that, it's your job to find them.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[HFShadow]

Did you read the article? Or maybe even skim it? Instead of basing your comment entirely off the summary?

In particular:

Staff taking advantage of the scheme must buy a three-year service contract. "From that point forth the device is their responsibility, and not that of the company," adds Mr Hollison. "We don't asset manage it in any way. "If they want to fill it full of photos and videos of their children, they're free to do so, because the connection back to Citrix is securely in the data centre.

So they're not running any business apps on their laptop, that's all at the dc on their citrix setup. They're also responsible for maintaining their own gear. Sorry, what was your argument again?

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[ShavedOrangutan]

That's just what I want, to support 30 or 40 different models, brands, or hell even architectures.

The less "support" I get, the better. The developers' cubicles should be off-limits to corporate IT.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[Telvin_3d]

If your work is not providing you with the tools needed to get your work done efficiently, that is not your problem it is theirs. You should talk to your manager. Talk to IT. Let them know that you are not getting the support you need to preform the job they are paying you to do. And then if they shrug and ignore you get your resume ready and get the hell out because that is a seriously bad symptom.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[Skarecrow77]

Slashdot is fast? They must let you have firefox or chrome. Slashdot on IE is bang-head-against-wall slow.

Thank god for RDPing into your home machine.

I've been on both ends of the stick. I've been the guy sitting there trying to do his job with one of 300 cloned machines with company standard hobbling and nannyware, and I've been the guy who hands out those machines to people and tries to support them.

You wouldn't believe how many ways people can still manage to break their machines no matter what you try to do to stop them, but I'll tell you something, and this is the "hidden truth" behind corporate standardized hardware:

As soon as we figure out how something got broken in the first place, we can either prevent other users from being able to break the computers in the first place, or we can repair the problem in 30 seconds next time instead of the half hour it took this time. Standardized hardware saves man-hours and increases up-time.

When one of my Vice Presidents breaks his computer, he doesn't want to hear why it's taking me a half hour to figure out what he did (sorry sir, your laptop is set up differently from everybody else's, and the fix that worked for them won't work for you), he just wants to get back to work. He's missing deadlines and losing money while I sit there researching a problem I probably already knew how to fix on our standard setup.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[blair1q]

If people are going to own their own computers, they're going to own their own software.

Corporate IT policy would be that files are stored in a certain place on the company servers for archival backups, and certain file formats are required for standardized communications.

Plus a raft of security requirements that are the user's responsibility.

Beyond that, it's ad hoc. No support needed. No particular piece of user-level software on a corporate license.

Of course, that eliminates the ability to get site-license pricing on things, but you're supposed to get that back in lower IT and hardware costs, na?

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[bananaquackmoo]

You're assuming all this person does is MS Office. Some of us need Photoshop, CAD, 3D modeling, video editing... and we're tired of the corporate office cheaping out and buying WAY underpowered computers. This sounds like a good idea to me.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[Obfuscant]

...the IT guys who want their 10 or so lives to be simple at the expense of the simplicity of the 1000 users who have to fight their computer to get it to do what they want it to.

Wow, you have ten IT guys to support 1000 users? That's 100 users per support person.

Imagine the fun for everyone involved if just fifty of those users went to the wrong website and picked up a bot or virus. Fifty people who are demanding immediate response from the ten IT guys to "fix it so I can do my work", the head of IT stopping by to find out why he's getting calls from other sites telling him about the multiple DOS attacks coming from within his domain. Where do the IT guys find the time to update anything? And how do they avoid the problems of updating 1000 different computers with 1000 different configurations?

Then the software-AA comes knocking and someone has to explain why 500 of those 1000 have installed copies of programs that nobody can find the license for...

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[turing_m]

Seriously, a 5 year old pendium D with 2gb of ram running XP will tear the fuck out of office 2003 or 2007. This is work. Do work.

You have my complete agreement, but I bet you have many managers/employees of influence sharpening their knives behind your back when you won't give them their latest $TOY_OF_THE_MONTH.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[Anonymous Coward]

if you believe for a second that they aren't calling corporate IT asking for help after they bork their own machine, now that it's a "company" affiliated computer, you're living in dreamland.

I've got a handful of users who run on non-standardized hardware, be it their own computer, a computer that their remote office owner bought for them, or what-have-you, and every single one of them still expects me to help get it to work even though they use citrix.

By the way, before those remote offices are being brought onto the company WAN with cisco pix devices in the near future, our VP of IT demanded that all their machines be replaced with our standardized hardware loadouts (which are actually pretty nice. Core 2 duo/quad workstations and i5/i7 laptops), no matter who pays for them. Good man.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[Imagix]

Huh? If everything is running off of Citrix back in the datacenter, then who really cares what the PC sitting in front of the user is doing? It's a glorified dumb terminal anyway. You don't need the latest whiz-bang machine to talk to Citrix.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[Skarecrow77]

you're more than welcome to take care of your problems yourself if you're competent to do so.

Do I sound like the kind of guy who is going to say "you can do that? no, let me do it for you".

On the other hand, when the changes you make break compatibility with something in the corporate network, and someone asks me why it's a problem to fix it, damn right my notes will be very detailed in exactly how your system differs from everybody else's, with disclaimers that it was not set that way by IT.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[natehoy]

Actually, they are using those tools so there can be only 10 or so of them. I mean, you could come closer to guaranteeing security without all that stuff if you had one of them for each user, standing over their shoulders, but what company is going to pay for that many security administrators? Plus, getting all the blood out of the carpet is a major pain, and there's the fussy paperwork once you have to beat a user to death to prevent them from clicking on the natalie_portman_in_hot_grits.exe they just got in their email.

If you have a 10:1000 ratio, that means each of your "IT guys" is responsible for keeping 100 people's machines from being infected by malware, surfing porn, or loading software on the computer that breaks compatibility with the software they need to do their jobs. That means they'll have, on average, about two days per year to deal with each of the individual computers they have to deal with.

With many users, it's not going to be a problem. But with only 1,000 desktops in your organization, 1 machine getting infected with a "look at the fluffy kitten!" trojan is more than enough to spread like wildfire through your network. If they don't have multiple firewalls, virus scanners, policy managers, etc in place, they'll have a 6-month backlog of work each time a virus hits your network. Plus a massive amount of lost data because users decided to use their local storage to save documents, and didn't bother backing up critical documents to the network where it gets backed up.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[Stregano]

This is work. Do work

Stop reminding me of the fact that I am on /. and not working. Wait, you aren't my boss peaking in on me, are ouy? I hope not. Yeah, This can't be said any better than what you said in your post, but seriously, I am trying to work, stop peaking over my shoulder. I am researching an issue

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[ElectricTurtle]

I cut my teeth in professional IT support at Seattle University's Law School almost a decade ago, and they had exactly this environment. They had one policy for student computers: you have to have a computer. Everything else was up for grabs. We had every OS imaginable walk through the doors of the Dept. of IT and Media Services, running on every brand you've ever heard of, and it was our job to support them all to the best of our ability. We had people come in with thousands of viruses, mangled peripherals, failing components, corrupted installations, illicit materials, and just plain old user stupidity all day every day.

And you know what, it was the most fun I ever had in IT support. Every day brought new and different problems, which, if you actually enjoy troubleshooting, is a lot better than the same damn thing breaking in the same damn way over and over and over, which is pretty much the sum of the rest of my support career. I'm pretty sick of the monotony of it and I'm going to shift to education in a few years.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[Red Flayer]

Wow, you have ten IT guys to support 1000 users? That's 100 users per support person.

Well, that's far more than some companies I've worked for.

One company That Shall Not Be Named By Me has a far higher ratio than that... the ratio is near 1:100 for support:[everyone else], where support includes admin, HR, accounting, finance, and IT.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[Nimey]

Pretty much. Why aren't they just getting Wyse terminals or summat?

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[anti-human 1]

Good. You break it, it's your problem then.

Rules are there for a reason. Security policies are there for a reason. If you don't like it, go to another job where they "get" you. Then, you can wonder why their IT budget is ballooning and you can't get your bonus.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[gregthebunny]

I really hope you're being sardonic.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[polaris20]

I am working on a first generation Intel dual core, 2 GB of RAM and Windows XP. I am expected to run Virtual Box with about 2 VMs and up to 2-3 instances of Visual Studio. While this is work, it's a pain in the ass to work on a shitty machine like this. I would love to be able to work on my laptop that is light years ahead of this piece of shit, performance wise. Of course, IT doesn't want it. Not everyone is lucky to work on machines that can get the job done.

Thank you for your anecdotal evidence containing a sob story. It's been noted. Signed, The IT Staff

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[petes_PoV]

Like almost everyone else here, the OP is addressing the broader question of whether employees in general should be allowed to use their own stuff at work. Not the narrow point about one single instance with one specific setup. The answer to the general question is (obvious to most) "hell no" and for so many different and varied reasons

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[Piata]

I completely understand your position but it's also one that has turned IE6 into an unstoppable zombie juggernaut. The "if you can do work on it, why upgrade" mentality has held back the web for some 12 years. Staying up to date with frequent tech refreshes can have a performance boost in the workplace and avoids a forced upgrade for all office equipment. A 5 year old pentium D with 2GB of RAM running XP will not tear the fuck out of a 60MB PSD file, nor will it gracefully handle a large AI file. It also can't install IE9, which means HTML5 cannot be widely adopted until the majority of the business world drops winXP.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[jimicus]

Of course, that eliminates the ability to get site-license pricing on things, but you're supposed to get that back in lower IT and hardware costs, na?

It's going to be an absolute nightmare if the BSA rock up because I bet you anything you like they won't go quietly when the IT director shows them a policy document stating "Employee PCs are the employee's problem".

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[COMON$]

Only if that 5 year old pentium D has had a hard drive refresh recently and is not a laptop. I have been in this industry for a while...machines get slower over time. Not relatively slower, but measurably, due to flex in the motherboard, wearing down of moving parts, static buildup...it happens, companies just need to learn to budget appropriately, you dont need to buy a secretary a Workstation, a terminal will do just fine or a simple celeron processor. Just budget for replacing every 3 years. So if you have a budget of $200 a year for a PC you can buy a $600 PC...that is a good machine with a decent warranty.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[ChristTrekker]

5 year old pentium D with 2GB of RAM running XP [...] can't install IE9, which means HTML5 cannot be widely adopted until the majority of the business world installs Firefox.

Fixed that for you.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[cpu6502]

>>>you're SUPPORT staff - your job solely consists of helping me do mine.

Wow what an ass. Do you treat janitors equally as bad? Or cooks? Bet they spit in your food.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[icebraining]

How do you know he works with .NET? VC++ is part of VS, you know.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[hedwards]

Strikes me as an excellent way to blame the staff for vulnerabilities. Citrix isn't going to solve all of the problems, and it's definitely not going to solve the problem of keyloggers.

Additionally, 3 years is a really long time, it's not uncommon for a person to average less time than that without ever being fired.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[gtall]

Just out of curiosity, what changes could the GP make that would bork your network. I could see changing a IP address might screw it up. Assigning IP's dynamically should handle that shouldn't it, the computer is going in and out of the building. I'm somewhat naive here, but what else could he managing his machine that would cause troubles outside of his machine?

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[bjorniac]

Thank god someone got it. I thought the mention of MATLAB might be enough of a hint that I'm not actually a PHB...

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[bjorniac]

Come on man, I even used the term 'bit monkey' that must have given you a hint that this was tongue in cheek stuff...

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[h4rr4r]

I have seen developers hook up home router+4 port switch devices, and manage to hook the internal network to a port that said device was giving out addresses on. He could just as easily run a DHCP server on his desktop.

In these cases I have always felt replacing the developer with someone who can manage his own equipment was the correct solution.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[h4rr4r]

And you are planning on buying your own Maya license, or you planning on pirating that?

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[h4rr4r]

Please explain how flex in a motherboard or any moving part wearing down slows a computer down measurably. I can't wait to hear this.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[Belial6]

So, you think we should all have stuck with mainframes then, and your job should never have existed in the first place?

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[swabeui]

100 times this. Most users don't have a clue about security or why they shouldn't install every stupid widget they see on the internet. It's hard enough keeping this junk from polluting the install base and network with company hardware. It would only be a matter of time before you heard "I'm not doing that, it's my computer and I'll do what I want with it". Heaven forbid some of the corporate software pooched some other program.

The only way I could see this working is if everyone ran a VM. Clients are lightweight, admins can control the environment and in the event of termination it's a simple disconnect from the 'hive'.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[dalemay]

use their computer, go to a site and click a link, get infected with a virus, get fired. End of story

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[Bassman59]

I have been in this industry for a while...machines get slower over time. Not relatively slower, but measurably, due to flex in the motherboard, wearing down of moving parts, static buildup...it happens,

Obviously you know nothing about electronics. Now shut the fuck up about "computers slowing down." The only moving parts in a PC are the hard drive and cooling fans. The hard drive doesn't "slow down" because of the wear on the mechanism. Now run along while the adults discuss the topic.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[Belial6]

Then you would wake up from the dream you are having. What world do you live in where you have 50 users getting a virus that bypasses their anti-virus software every day? That is pure fantasy. You make it sound like 100 users is a lot for a single person to support. It's not. You are not personal assistants, out picking up laundry. You are are in the computer industry. That means that much of your job can be automated, and with few exceptions, all of your users problems should be able to be solved without even getting up from your desk. When you scale that up, it gets easier.

Your claim of 1000 different configurations, while technically may be true, claiming that creates big problems is a little like claiming that 1000 configuration of human make it impossible to support the company toilet with only 100 people. Different configurations do not necessarily create more work.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[networkconsultant]

Ok, I'm not sure how familiar you are with Citrix; But deploying meta frame means you are deploying a server farm, just give them thin clients at their desks; or whatever cheap $200 crap you can find with a montior and keyboard. If they want to Terminal in with Thier Alienware laptop whilst playing Blac Ops by all means let them. But for heavens sake don't let the twain meet.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[Belial6]

Exactly. I do development, and I get that. My job is to make sure the users can do their jobs. Sometimes, it is even to make sure the user is just happy, even if there is no direct provable improvement. Some developers get this, some don't. It seems few admins understand that this is also their role.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[Stregano]

I should change that, as I have been playing nice for way too long.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[thegarbz]

The problem is still quite valid. What company these days has Citrix as their soul connection to a computer? Chances are computers will need to be part of an organised network that has access to Citrix. While this provides segregation between the dirty computers and the applications it doesn't prevent a potential spread of a virus amongst the dirty network.

If you're reaction to this is why does it matter, then you have failed in an IT support role. A virus that affects productivity is bad regardless if it appears on a company owned computer or someone's home netbook they are using for work. With a hands off approach to IT, and letting people deal with their own problems how are IT supposed to stop things like this to ensure that users spend their time at work doing work, rather than on the phone to their support company.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[JaredOfEuropa]

Your concern is valid, but I despise this attitude: "we don't want choice and variety, not because it's bad for the company but because it makes life hard for us". It's the kind of attitude we've had to beat out of our legal and compliance departments; anything non-standard used to mean an automatic rejection (god forbid they'd have to do some actual work). Now they work with us and make the decision that is good for the company, and not just for them. And thankfully, the IT departments are coming around to that way of thinking. Don't forbid choice and enforce a one-size-fits-all policy; learn to accommodate it.

As I said, security and supportability are issues, but they're becoming smaller issues by the week. Stuff like virtualisation, remote desktops and apps, and browser-based software are a big help. For the rest, re-think your deployment of firewalls, vires scanners and intrusion detection. One of my clients is already making this happen in a few ways, and they are finding that supporting this so-called mess turns out to be a lot easier than they thought it would be. There's only a few real trouble cases, and in those cases they always have a fallback: using a corporate laptop.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[Grishnakh]

Staff taking advantage of the scheme must buy a three-year service contract.

Why on earth would I shell out my own money to use my own computer for work purposes?

If they want me to access my work computer from home, they can damn well pay for it themselves. Otherwise, I'll just wait until I get to the office. There's nothing going on at work that's so important that I need to do it from home.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[adamofgreyskull]

Do janitors institute policies that impede his work? Do cooks? Doubtful. He's being a tad vitriolic but he has a valid point. A lot of functions within most companies are there purely to support the members of staff whose output garners revenue. HR, accounts, IT, Janitors, Cafeteria staff, Receptionists, Admins, Managers are just there to make sure the actual business activity continues as profitably as possible. If any of those groups start making policies that impede the main business activity, they become counter-productive, and provoke vitriolic rants like the one above.

I work in a support role and absolutely agree with what he's saying, though, like you, I hope he doesn't talk like that to I.T. staff in person.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[omb]

NO, the answer is the industry has grow up, computers and smart phones, netbooks and tablets are now commodities.

The IT guys need to get used to that and that Windows will be a minority player in that world. The days of owning/managing the client side are over. No ownership, no control.

Idiots like you need to think quick, because they wont tolerate your continued intervention anymore than they would in their next car or fridge! If you can't stop this silly 1970s attitude you will find yourself, but only 1 in 100 administering the CLOUD contract for servers, as well.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[hal2814]

I worked for a place where everyone was expected to have their own PCs for work. It was an f'ing nightmare. It's all well and good to say that PC issues aren't the IT Deparment's problem... until your best salesman cruds up his computer from spending all of his free time looking at porn and playing poker online. So he's out there not making money which makes the company furious. They can't just fire him because he's worth too much. If only they had someone who knew how to fix PCs.

Hey you know who knows a lot about fixing PCs? The IT Department. Why don't you guys do us a solid and fix the golden boy's PC so he can get some work done. You know... just this once.

Thanks but no thanks. Never again for me.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[xero314]

So they're not running any business apps on their laptop, that's all at the dc on their citrix setup.

That sounds like the worst possible set up. You lose the power of distributed computing. Today every person has a reasonably powerful desktop capable of running multiple threads of execution. Using something like Citrix, you are basically wasting uncountable cycles and wasting memory and bandwidth. This set up probably even has the web apps, the actual HTML rendering, etc, on a central server rather than offloading that onto the client machines.

Never mind the absolute nuisance it would be to require a network connection to be able to do even the most trivial task. I have my box set up so that I don't need a single network connection to carry out all the duties my job entails, except interpersonal communication, which in theory I can handle by phone if I had to. I intentionally unplug my self from the network from time to time so that I can get actual work done without interruption.

Citrix really needs to change their vision from "A world where anyone can work and play from anywhere" to "A world where anyone can work and play from anywhere there is an active, high-speed, low latency, connection to a currently running centralized application server (not currently overloaded by concurrent users)."

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[oldmac31310]

did you mean pendulum? what is this XP you speak of?

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[Theaetetus]

That's just what I want, to support 30 or 40 different models, brands, or hell even architectures.

Totally - I mean, a user of an HP computer with Windows 7 signs into a remote access server and receives a secure virtual desktop, and a user of a Mac with OSX signs into a remote access server and receives a secure virtual desktop, and a user of a Dell computer with Windows XP signs into a remote access server and receives a secure virtual desktop... Obviously, we can't handle such complicated things!

To say nothing of when their own personal laptop that they used to surf horse porn last night brings some nasty viruses to work to test the corporate network.

Secure virtual machines. Remote Access. If you're still concerned about personal laptops with viruses, you're probably not at the level of skill to be having this discussion.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[bennomatic]

Dude, a 5 year old ANYTHING running XP doesn't even come out of sleep mode reliably.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[Velex]

What world do you live in where you have 50 users getting a virus that bypasses their anti-virus software every day?

What world do you live in where they don't?

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[Chucky_M]

You're in IT. Like it or not, you're SUPPORT staff - your job solely consists of helping me do mine. If I damned well want to use my computer to do X it's your job to make this possible. That's what you are paid for. I'm sure you could keep a nice little network if it weren't for us users doing annoying things like using our computers to do work. If I want to run MATLAB from home, you make it damned possible for me to do that. If I want my email in a separate Thunderbird folder on my laptop, you do that. Otherwise there's no point in having you.

I'm sure this will come as a shock to a lot of you, but it isn't the goal of every enterprise to have a neat little network. And the time I spend having to get my password reset because the bit monkey insists that I change it every 6 weeks and that it contain at least 10 letters, 2 numbers and 2 non-alphanumeric characters? That's time wasted from me making money that keeps us all in business.

To put it bluntly: I don't give a damn what you're happy with - it's what I'M happy with that counts. Do your job well and you're a force multiplier, but remember that your function is to multiply MY output.

I think this is a major part of the problem, many people in IT seem to forget that they are there to help, much of the enforcement actually makes IT a department nobody want's to deal with. This has the impact that people try hard to work around the IT people all the time which creates an unhelpful environment. This then causes a knee jerk reaction to increase the enforcement which becomes a self fulfilling prophecy where IT support is considered at best unhelpful at worst useless.

As the distance between enforcing control and helping people is getting larger, it is no surprise that many IT departments get outsourced and yes in the majority of cases this made the situation worse because it is much harder dealing with essentially another company that has different goals to yours.

I do not know what the solution might be, but perhaps allowing the user more control is at least a step in the correct direction.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[xtracto]

That will just mean that the IT guys are incompenent.

The task of the IT is to solve technological problems for the people in the company who are actually working to make money. For example, I am in a research institute, I do research, I run simulations, I get grants. Such grants pay my salary AND the salaries of administration and IT.

Imagine if the secretarial/admin. staff were the same prima-donnas as the IT staff? Fuck it. I *know* about technology and I know it is possible to have a transparent secure environment. I don't like NO for an answer when I must install something for my work. That's the reason why everytime it happens, I just go to my "boss" (head of department) and magically, after he asks the IT if it is possible, then it becomes possible (e.g. WTF do you mean I cannot install Netbeans with the last Java SDK??? my groups' simulations are done using *that*!)

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[Jawnn]

Those "IT guys" are responsible for preventing all the dumb-ass messes users make when the users are not doing the work they're supposed to do. If they fail to do that, they get blamed, so yeah, they're locking down the company's computer and network. You might be in the 10% who know not to open that tempting, unsolicited email sent by one of your Facebook "friends", but the users who don't grasp such a fundamental risk are legion and as a group, they will do stupid shit like that on a regular basis. So it's not their own lives that the IT guys are looking to "simplify" (as in keeping the environment free of malware and other stupid user tricks), its that of every user on your network. If they don't, and the bomb some clueless user sets off takes things down, it's their ass, not yours.
Deal with it.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[Belial6]

The real one. Any place that has a 5% daily infection rate doesn't happen by accident. Not in the real world.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[Jaime2]

My company (really big company with fifty thousand employees) recently switch from company issued cell phones to personal cell phones and is in the process of allowing personal computers instead of company issued computers. One thing we have found is that the savings of personal issued devices far outweighs the extra costs of managing a more diverse system.

For example, two years ago, all employee phones were BlackBerries. Managing a fleet of corporate BlackBerries is fairly simple. However, we had the costs of acquisition and idle contracts. At any one time, at least 30% of the cell phones were idle, but still under contract. People get hired and fired, switch jobs, need temporary mobile access, etc. Now, we support iOS, Android (with and without TouchDown), and BlackBerry. It is more expensive to support all three, but we never pay a bill for an idle cell phone. It has saved us millions in the first year.

As an added bonus, people like me who aren't on call can get our personal devices connected and make life a bit easier. In the old system if I couldn't get over the justification bar of buying me a phone, it wouldn't happen at all. In the current system, they are more than happy to hook me up but not pay my bill when I don't need it. Now I can check my email in meetings and get my phone's calendar synchronized with my Exchange calendar. All of these things make me more productive from 9 to 5. I am under no obligation to respond to anything after I leave work, so I don't see it as giving up any of my personal time. In the end, this works out to hundreds of thousands of dollar in added productivity across the company all for simply being more inclusive.

Who cares if you don't want to support 40 different models, it's your job. The whole point of IT is to manage the technology that makes people more productive. It's not to whine and bitch about something being too hard. So you have to learn some new systems and clean some viruses, big deal. Paying you to do that is worth it.

Re:Good for everybody but the IT guy?

[Jaime2]

The answer to the general question is (obvious to most) "hell no" and for so many different and varied reasons

...yet we've already done it with cell phones and are starting to do it with computers. Sure it's harder to manage personal devices, but it's worth it. Why would an IT worker be against an idea that almost certainly requires more IT staff? BTW, we're not some startup looking to attract young talent, we're a Fortune 50 company that knows that people are going to buy technology anyways. By making one purchase together, both the company and the employee win.

Maybe.

[maillemaker]

As these things get cheaper and cheaper, maybe so. But then again, maybe not.

For years I have always purchased my own engineering calculators. I'm glad they are my personal property.

A few years ago I purchased my own 3D mouse for CAD work. I am glad I own it, also. They are so cheap that I can't imagine operating CAD software without one, regardless of whether the company would pay for one or not.

Computers may be approaching that cost level.

BUT

The problem is that computers must interface with the corporate network. They are going to want to control what software is on it, security settings, and the like. So you might own the hardware, but you may not have much control over it.

Re:Maybe.

[ewhenn]

The problem is that computers must interface with the corporate network. They are going to want to control what software is on it, security settings, and the like. So you might own the hardware, but you may not have much control over it.

Which is exactly the problem. Your mouse that you mentioned doesn't run complex software or store valuable data. It doesn't get infected with viruses, nor is it a potential security liability for the company of you are canned. If you give up control of your property to a third party, you are no longer an owner, you are a steward.

If a company thinks I'm going to buy any piece of hardware, and then essentially turn it over to them, they can go pound sand.

In fact, my company basically said, "Oh, you have a BB of your own, lets get you setup with company email on it". I laughed and asked them if they were going to pay for my BB. Of course the answer was, "No". If they would have said yes, I would have been surprised, but would have just told them that, "I wasn't aware of that 'benefit' and I'd keep it in mind for a future point in time", in my own scathingly snide way. You guys that let a company control your personal property are spineless, go grow a funckin' set.

Sometimes you want to use a computer you know.....

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

I use my own computer simply because, pure and simple, it works and I am intimate with it (minus the candles and Barry White). I'm a developer and use a Macbook Pro, but I have been in environments where all that was available was Windows and I have witnessed other developers installing Cygwin, recompiling MySQL to work with the Windows binary, etc etc. Not that this is ineffective, it's just a matter of being time consuming and being a contractor where I'm hired by the job, time is money.

step one: allow them to do so

[Surt]

2: Require them to do so.
3: Don't pay them to do so.
4: Profit!

Re:step one: allow them to do so

[Fibe-Piper]

2: Require them to do so. 3: Don't pay them to do so. 4: Profit!

Your post is funny and may be true in some cases. But the net affect may be a loss of money.

After all people walking in and out of the office with property that is no longer assumed to be that of the employer will no doubt hamper efforts to control the inventory levels of said company.

Re:step one: allow them to do so

[blair1q]

3a. Charge them to do so.

Re:step one: allow them to do so

[GodfatherofSoul]

This reminds me of the policy my college adopted back in the mid-nineties that mandated having personal computers on enrollment. This gave professors the flexibility to mandate computer use, but lifted the burden from the university to provide adequate resources to their students. When questioned about this disparity, the school administrators simply said to get a student loan and buy a computer if you didn't have one.

Re:step one: allow them to do so

[petes_PoV]

5 Spend all that profit and more trying to debug obscure problems caused by network abuse 6 Work all weekends cleaning up the mess after some fool brought in a laptop with a virus on it 7 Wonder why the company insurance won't pay out when someone trips over the lead of another employees persona phone charger 8 Discover that when an employee leaves, half the kit you *knew* was yours leaves with them - as there's no asset checking 9 Suddenly find that someone downloaded the entire customer contact database, all your designs and finance data onto a USB stick, and they're now your competition (but without those pesky development/sales costs)

Re:step one: allow them to do so

[Attack DAWWG]

3b. Sue them for doing so. Profit!!1!

Re:step one: allow them to do so

[hedwards]

Since security is often times 3rd party, that's not likely to work out like that. More likely what would happen is that you'd have to prove that you owned the materials that you're taking out of the building.

Re:step one: allow them to do so

[giorgist]

5. Sombody else does
6. loss!

Re:step one: allow them to do so

[Jaime2]

You only have fears and suspicions that these things will happen. We have let thousands of employees use their own stuff (that's just a pilot group for us), and have saved money. I'm not saying that it isn't more expensive to support personal devices, I'm saying that the saving are greater than the costs.

BTW, #9 isn't an IT problem, it's a legal problem. The only way for IT to prevent it on company owned computers would be to epoxy the USB ports and block almost all internet traffic, including email. Do you go that far?

The article talks about VDI a lot

[Dr_Barnowl]

Several of the examples in the article are not talking about owning your own computer, but using your own computer to access a remote desktop on a VM in a server farm somewhere. I fail to see how this makes the computer "your own" or allows you to customize it to your requirements. Quite the opposite, because VDI images are usually the same snapshot of the same VM with your user profile mounted over a network.

Sounds like business promoting an externality to me - they want all the advantages of a locked down computer in a physically secure location, realized they'll have to shell out for the server farm, the network infrastructure AND a bunch of VDI terminals - and then realized they could get silly mugs to pay for their own terminal on the premise they are "owning their own".

This is a world apart from companies that actually allow users to be in charge of their own computer - and that typically is only practical, and only occurs, where there is a high level of tech savvy. Like Google, who will buy you the computer you ask for and let you install what the hell you like on it.

Kraft? I'd be gobsmacked if they fell into the latter group.

Re:The article talks about VDI a lot

[Kjella]

This is a world apart from companies that actually allow users to be in charge of their own computer - and that typically is only practical, and only occurs, where there is a high level of tech savvy. Like Google, who will buy you the computer you ask for and let you install what the hell you like on it.

For general employees yes, fortunately it's more common in IT departments because they do so much changes and testing and whatnot. Many companies I've been to have had the policy "You work in IT. You should be able to manage your own desktop. You have local admin rights. If you fuck it up, we will wipe it for you but we will not support it in any way." Also I've experienced that doesn't have to be a strict rule, just a rule of thumb and IT can get you on that list if you make too many legitimate requests where you paint by-the-numbers steps for them. Also works for server admins once they realize you're not going to make a mess for them.

Re:The article talks about VDI a lot

[Curmudgeonlyoldbloke]

... because it's basically a PR piece for Citrix, not a news story.

Re:The article talks about VDI a lot

[jago25_98]

"This is a world apart from companies that actually allow users to be in charge of their own computer - and that typically is only practical, and only occurs, where there is a high level of tech savvy. Like Google, who will buy you the computer you ask for and let you install what the hell you like on it."

Absolutely. And I can tell you how frustrating it can be to work in a company surrounded by non tech savvy users because you're in lock down and there's little you can do about it.

Re:The article talks about VDI a lot

[martyros]

I fail to see how this makes the computer "your own" or allows you to customize it to your requirements.

At very least it would allow you to invest in a high-quality monitor or two, maybe even a specialty keyboard and mouse combo, that you could take with you when you move to another company.

Re:NO!

[spidercoz]

agreed, maintaining any kind of network integrity would be impossible, it's bad enough as it is

Slippery Slope

[c 0xFF]

Good idea: letting your employees bring in their own computers
Bad idea: making your employees bring in their own computers

And I'm not even saying that it would become official company policy. Once a manager sees the savings, the upgrade cycle becomes even more drawn out and employees have to bring in their own stuff by default, just to get anything done.

But if I could charge my company a rental fee for bringing in my own computer ... that might change things a bit. :)

Re:Slippery Slope

[__aatirs3925]

I think letting people bring their own computer is OK if they pass benchmark tests and they are working for a blog site or something. I can't imagine a fortune company allowing their employees to use their own computers, or rather even mandate it. There are too many security flaws, loopholes, and legal reprocautions to both parties to allow this kind of thing to happen. It would be a bad business decision even to -let- someone use their personal computer unless there's an emergency and the employee can be absolutely trusted. Though, in the world of business, even your CIO can be the most crooked person in the world and you think otherwise. Oh business politics, have you no end?

Re:Slippery Slope

[blair1q]

It would have to be scanned for threats before connecting to the internal network.

Every time it tried to connect to the internal network.

Productive, that.

Re:Slippery Slope

[geekoid]

No, both are bad ideas.

Re:Slippery Slope

[Obfuscant]

Bad idea: letting your employees bring in their own computers

There, fixed that for you.

The first time someone brings in their own computer and uses that personal copy of Office or Matlab or other really expensive licensed program for corporate work and gets caught, the money saved by not having to buy that new system will prove the adage "penny wise, pound foolish". And ditto when the employee walks out with a copy of several expensive company-licensed programs and another copy has to be purchased for his replacement.

Re:Slippery Slope

[c 0xFF]

Depends on your point of view. To an employer, the idea looks tempting on paper, but the ultimate result could be a disaster.

As an employee, I would love to have the option of bringing in my own computer to make up for my employer's tight purse strings. And there's very few downsides.

Not that there aren't potential problems, of course. See my original post, for example. But I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea from the employee's perspective.

Re:Slippery Slope

[minorproblem]

Hey i already bring in my own stationary to work. Ever since my work started buying no name crap pens and highlighters i got sick of eating through a pen and 3 highlighters a week and post it notes that don't stick, or a hole punch that doesn't punch. So i went out and bought it all myself and keep it in a big pencil case in my bag. What makes me crazy is we are suppose to be a high tech engineering firm producing advanced products, but they skimp on the stationary! Couldn't even get them to get me book ends or a book case for my engineering notes so i currently have a massive pile of notebooks and logbooks on my desk.

Re:Slippery Slope

[Thing 1]

Completely agree. We need network standards, not "Windows standards."

always did it

[roman_mir]

I used my own laptop whenever I could, of-course for a contractor it's not too hard, but they won't let you do it everywhere, there are 'security concerns', and 'network standards', as if there is anything I cannot do to the network once I am on the inside of the company already. It's silly.

Uh, no.

[Jethro]

That's a bit on the ridiculous side, especially for large enterprise. An employer needs to secure their network, and that includes all devices connected to the network. ALL OF THEM. If people own the computers then they can rightfully put whatever programs they want on them and then security goes out the window. You may THINK that if you citrix/whatever in there, but employees will eventually use their personal desktop space for critical and sensitive information instead of leaving it on the "secure" network, and you'd have no way to check or enforce this.

Re:Uh, no.

[DuEyNZ]

I'm not a system admin, but isn't it stupid to assume that it is possible to secure every device on the network? Wouldn't a more appropriate approach be to assume that every single device is vulnerable and design a system for that scenario?

Re:Uh, no.

[ShavedOrangutan]

An employer needs to secure their network, and that includes all devices connected to the network. ALL OF THEM.

I hear this all the time, but if the network is so delicate that a random machine can cause a problem, then there is a problem with the network.

Re:Uh, no.

[SuperQ]

You fail at defense in depth school.

Re:Uh, no.

[Jethro]

I /am/ a system admin, and I specialise in security, and yes, you DEFINITELY design your network thinking that some day, someone will gain unauthorised access to it and you plan so that when this happens, damage is minimised.

That said, you don't just leave the gates open with unnecessary risks. Having 100% locked down devices RADICALLY reduces the risk of people gaining that unauthorised access.

Lets say you let remote users have laptops. As a security minded person you assume some of them will get lost/stolen, but since you have 100% control you enforce extremely strong encryption on them. You also lock down the software so nobody's seeding torrents running other P2P stuff off them, you know that an anti virus is run on a regular basis, and you know for a FACT these machines are still secure when they connect to your network because the 100% locked down VPN software tests all this before you are allowed to logon.

Now if this is the employee's machine, can you force him to give you complete control of it? I don't think so. So you give him one of your computers which you CAN control.

Re:Uh, no.

[Jethro]

You don't go ahead and assume that your network is so secure that one machine can't break it. Just because it's extremely unlikely doesn't mean you ignore it.

Here's an example. You let an employee use his own personal computer to connect. You have NO IDEA what's going on on that computer. Might have viruses, trojans, keyloggers, you name it.

Now lets say someone gains unauthorised access to that computer, because it's not patched against whatever the latest Zero Day IE exploit is. This someone installs the above keyloggers. This person can also check what software your employee is using to access your network (and can easily install it on their OWN computer(s)) and of course now knows their passwords.

Lets say all this person manages to access is the employee's email.

Can you imagine how much damage can happen JUST based on that?

Now sure, if you're a tiny company with like five employees it might not be a big deal. But imagine you're a company with 1,000 employees. Now 10,000. Now 100,000+. IT needs to have more and more control the more people are on there, because it becomes impossible to use the honour system.

As someone mentioned above, you HAVE to assume people are trying REALLY HARD to access your network, and you have to assume they'll get in. If you're IT Security, it's your job to be paranoid. It's also your ass if something happens.

Re:Uh, no.

[Jethro]

How about cut'n'pasting an email? How about stopping keyloggers? How about stopping p2p clients? How about enforcing patch levels? How about ensuring antiviruses are up to date? etc etc etc.

Re:Uh, no.

[Jethro]

That's kind of my point.

But the phone company sets up a network SPECIFICALLY for the phone users. They make certain promises as to it's security. I'm pretty sure they're not the same as what they expect IT to do on their internal machines.

Re:Uh, no.

[pcb]

This happens anyways. I often take work home and use my machine at home. I bet a lot people do this...

PCB

Re:Uh, no.

[omb]

NO, you make the ongoing mistake that technical measures can control or limit human behavior, in reality it can not.

Behind all the Wikileaks and corporate angst is the implied lie that IT drones can enforce Corporate or National security and that the rank and file employee is not to be trusted.

All vital secrets are simple, and can be written on the back of a beer mat, eg E=mc^2, China may short the Eurobond market, ...

This ignores the many people with eidetic recall, or simply very good memories eg rememberencers as used in Hawala banking.

The problem with the parent is it draws all the wrong conclusions, in a facile fashion, by living in yesteryear, and confuses technical and process matters.

This is part if "when the sg1t hits the fan I must have a CUA strategy", and won't work. If the high level diplomats in the US state department had been issued with ONE-TIME-PADS or BOOK-PAGE references and had had to encrypt their vicarious rudeness by hand we would have had a lot less of it, Mr Obama, are you listening.

When the Mossad has a wikileaks experience you will know it is hard, until then the right conclusion is that the US is populated-and-governed-by lazy corrupt idiots.

Re:Uh, no.

[Jethro]

No, I know all this. But given all that, why on Earth would you be willing to pay for your own hardware that you can't do whatever the hell you want with?

Sorry, not happening

[Bigbutt]

They'd want control over my home system including installing corporate sanctioned or purchased software and need to manage assets.

For the technical folks, certainly we'd have better systems. But someone not quite so technical might only have an e-machine or an old Linux box someone set up for them or even an old Windows 98 SE box.

There is also the compatibility issues. I may be using OpenOffice while the other guy is using MS Office 2007 and the next guy is using emacs.

Not to mention issues with internal software working with employee hardware. There's always a big problem when moving to the next upgrade in ensuring existing company apps will work and usually one or two legacy apps that must continue to work.

Yea, I'm not letting the internal systems guys (Windows guys) near my Mac, Sun, or Linux systems.

[John]

They're call consultants

[ArhcAngel]

Aren't people who use all of their own equipment to do a job called consultants? I'll happily use my equipment but you will pay for the privilege.

Re:They're call consultants

[blair1q]

Yes, because the IRS rules state if you don't use your own equipment and office space you probably aren't a consultant, even if you're a high-paid itinerant temporary worker.

Re:They're call consultants

[Xanthas]

Yes, because the IRS rules state if you don't use your own equipment and office space you probably aren't a consultant, even if you're a high-paid itinerant temporary worker.

Who is then eligible for unemployment...

Re:They're call consultants

[blair1q]

I don't get your meaning.

The whole point of hiring temporary employees, is that they're expendable under less stringent rules than full-time permanent employees. Last-in, first-out, no benefits, no deference.

The IRS on the other hand doesn't let you classify yourself as a "consultant" if you're using your client's equipment or office space.

Might work

[jdastrup]

It would work as long as the personally-owned device acts as a dumb terminal. Instead of buying a dumb terminal for an employee, tell them to use their own. But having company data sit on a personal computer will never happen for all the reasons already mentioned.

Some equipment should be personal.

[Lashat]

I would use a company computer, but my cell phone is always mine so I can turn the thing off.

Oh god no

[MichaelSmith]

I assume the article is referring to small businesses who can't buy gear in bulk. I maintained a server for a company like that. One guy used his own laptop on the company network and used the same machine to browse dodgy porn sites from home after hours. That machine was the sole source of virus infections on the LAN and I wish I had been able to ban that machine from the site.

In other news where I work people are buying tablets for web browsing because our IT policies contain no definition for acceptable use of company equipment beyond normal work.

Re:Oh god no

[geekoid]

Gee, it would be a shame if a virus got on his machine and wiped it. Cough.

Re:Oh god no

[Belial6]

It sounds like you have a problem that is totally unrelated to technology. I can drive onto my employers property with my personal car. If I start doing donuts in the parking lot, they will tell me that I cannot do that anymore. They will NOT make a corporate policy banning personal cars in the parking lot. Why? Because the problem isn't that there are personal cars in the parking lot.

Maybe better would be that, I could take my personal car to the local porn shop, full the back seat up with porn and various other 'marital aids'. I could fill it to the brim. If I drive that car onto the employers property, it will be considered a serious problem if I get out of my car, and a pile of hard core fetish porn spills out of the door, and a half dozen devices start buzzing across the ground, just the most easily offended female office worker is walking by. Again, no one is going to blame the problem on the fact that employees can park their personal cars on company property. It will be seen as a person problem.

The fact is that most jobs require their employees to use some of their own personal property in doing their job. Even if that is the pants I wear to keep from scaring my co-workers. I know the knee jerk response is to say "that's different". Well, it isn't. Not all jobs require employees to supply their own clothing. Pretty much all of the jobs that might entail using your own laptop, but there are lots that supply their employees with company issued pants.

This whole debate boils down to "it's on a computer so it's totally different than all of the exact same things that are not on a computer".

Re:Oh god no

[MichaelSmith]

Well okay but imagine you are trying to stop Bradley Manning from copying ten years of diplomatic cables and emailing them to Julian Assange. Controlling the list of systems with access to the "most embarrassing cables" network would be a good start.

Re:Oh god no

[Belial6]

This is how the arguements go. One reason is given, and when it is pointed out that it is a red herring, it is a different argument, and after a good round of pointing out the flaws in the admin's arguments, the start back at the beginning.

So, as to stopping someone from copying ten years of diplomatic cables, the answer is that first you need to determine the kind of information you are trying to protects. Most businesses are NOT government agencies trying to protect international secrets. Second, keeping people from connecting their own laptops isn't even the start of what needs to be done to protect against employees taking data. You need to ban cameras, including phones with cameras, you need to deny unmonitored people from accessing systems, you need to treat your entire facility like it is a military installation.

That just isn't cost effective for most of the businesses out there to protect a client list, or some internal memos. Recognizing the difference between a medical facility, a financial facility and a steel mill is key to properly setting up security.

So, unless your protecting national secrets, your example is pure FUD.

Software Licensing is an issue

[rsborg]

Note: I have brought in my macbook to work before (as a consultant).

The use of internal standard software (Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat Pro in my case) posed a difficult problem since the licensing is hard to track... employee leaves company, but keeps the laptop, employee brings own software, etc.

Finally the issue of company information and security is better managed if the user of the laptop doesn't have root.

VMware View

[eeg3]

It's interesting to see the article focus so much on Citrix, when VMware currently has the most market share in VDI.

Re:NO!

[ruemere]

Amen.

Or, if I really have to manage your private computer, you need to hand all your user access rights to me, including ALL administrative privileges. And agree for standard set of services preconfigured to comply with company regulations.

Regards,
Ruemere

Re:NO!

[Hacksaw]

If someone wants to steal something, and you are trying to prevent it, short of a body cavity search everyday, you've already lost the game. You can steal a code base and drawings for virtually any product by simply copying it onto a USB flash drive, and walking out. Often your cell phone will suffice.

If you are trying to prevent viruses and stuff, the same techniques apply for company owned laptops versus employee owned. If they can take it home, it can get infected. You might ameliorate things by having a forced virus checker installation, but a voluntary one will generally work just as well.

In the end, the only thing you are can't do is take the machine away, but this is such a rare event that it's almost not worth considering.

So who then loses out when the computer goes down?

[Leslie43]

Either your I.T. department starts maintaining your employees own computers, or you lose time and money when the employee can't work. Even if you hold them responsible, you are still losing work time.

This is just a terrible idea.

People do all sorts of things to their own computers that they wouldn't/shouldn't do to a work computer, all of which brings in problems. Combine this with the fact that they now have all of these time wasters on their work computer and you are throwing money out the window.

Letting users upgrade....

[jameskojiro]

How about letting users add more memory, another hard drive etc?

Seems more reasonable.

Re:Letting users upgrade....

[Dr_Barnowl]

Anecdotally I hear a lot of users do this anyway. I know I do.

The pain and suffering it takes to go through procurement to get an $80 RAM upgrade that the outsourced 3rd-party support will charge $200 for anyway and take weeks to fit, is worth paying the $80 to avoid. I get to be more productive, which is satisfying, which is again, worth more than $80. I may even save myself doing more than $80 worth of unpaid overtime because my computer works faster.

And at the end of it, when I leave, my old desktop gets a RAM upgrade. Which is probably worth a bit less than $80 because of depreciation, but what the heck.

So buying your own RAM upgrade is the gift that keeps giving...

Re:Letting users upgrade....

[Thing 1]

Yeah, I'd even let the company keep the $1500 machine I just bought, because it has already paid for itself in time I'm not spending waiting for the machine to respond, and at the same time losing what was in my short term memory.

Everybody!

[blair1q]

You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
Saint Peter, don't you call me, 'cause I can't go;
I owe my soul to the company store.

Two issues

[SethThresher]

On the one hand, everyone would be more willing to take care of their own machine that they bought and paid for.

On the other hand, security would be disastrous.

Changing approach

[MikeB0Lton]

This is just evidence of the changing approach to IT. If you assume nothing on the network is secure and present all of the sensitive stuff using server-side resources (think Citrix XenApp, VMware View, etc) then it doesn't matter as much. Set a policy that requires installation of such-and-such antivirus, OS, etc and let it go. Stop caring if the computer hits less savory websites and just monitor usage of the business owned pipes. It won't work for every scenario but it can in many.

A matter of economics

[googlesmith123]

What can I say. I think this is a terrible idea.

I don't know about the US, but here in Europe the employer provides everything the the employee needs. A programmer with 3-5 years of university education really shouldn't spend their time trying to set up a secure backup solution. That should be the job of someone who doesn't know how to build an operating system from the ground up, or how to write an ip-stack or plan huge complex software solutions for managing more information a second than any human could read in a lifetime.

Seriously. Specialize. Someone should be great at setting up and maintaining computers, other should be great at programming assembly. Being great at something really does require continues dedication.

Any minute now they will want cops to buy their own guns. Teachers to buy their own books. Train operators buy their own trains :P and nuclear engineers to bring their own uranium to work.

No.

[bb5ch39t]

My machines belong to me. The stuff on them is mine, not the company's. And I don't want any confusion about that. I have VPN access from home to the corporate LAN. We also have a Windows "work at home" server which is accessible via MS's mstsc. I use that, not the VPN/LAN. I use Linux at home and rdesktop to access that server. Once on that server, I use mstsc to access my work desktop. Why? it makes my home machine safer. My home machine is more of a "dumb terminal" which cannot be infected by or infect anything at work. Or at least it is significantly less likely. I'm not aware of any virus which can spread over an mstsc link. Which means little, given my ignorance. My home system is behind a firewall/router, so hopefully it is too much trouble to crack. I don't need "impossible", just need "harder than average" to discourage most. Running Linux and no Windows also helps.

Drawing lines

[joeflies]

So what happens if your company happens to be Enron and your computer gets supoened by the court? Your personal stuff gets hauled away at the same time? I don't think they'll untangle your business life from your work life when there's only one computer for them to investigate.

The other issue I forsee is what happens with wiping the drive? Maybe you quit the company, the corporate IT system issues a wipe to your iphone, and guess what, your personal data's gone too.

It's not always a good idea to blend your business life with your work life, especially when you don't know whether the corporate security policies trump your personal data.

In my neck of the woods...

[oic0]

I'm allowed to use my own peripherals but if I were wanting to use my own tower I would have to essentially donate it. For things to work here the IT has to have complete access to my computer, if it were my property it would be a bit awkward. Most of the workers here don't even have admin access because of they get a virus etc... it could leak private info. Not give someone administrative privileges on their own hardware? see how that goes over.

Re:In my neck of the woods...

[tepples]

Not give someone administrative privileges on their own hardware? see how that goes over.

In other words, converting a general-purpose computer into an appliance. That worked wonderfully in the mid-1980s when the NES replaced 8-bit home computers as the video gaming platform of choice.

And on the other side

[pavon]

There is no way I am going to let work enforce their Group Policy settings on my personal hardware. Or slow down my computer with mandatory Symantec junk, or all the crapware that comes with National Instruments software. Or wipe my machine when some idiot emails sensitive information.

I don't mind using RemoteDesktop from home every now and then if it saves me from coming into work, but that is about the limit.

Re:And on the other side

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

I agree completely. For any company to require me to use my own hardware, there had better be some kick-ass perks coming my way, or I will just take a pass. Now if any company were to offer me a situation good enough (Pay/benefits) that I would be willing to accept a policy like this I would just buy a machine for work, and keep my personal computer personal.

Remote Desktop is the best thing Microsoft ever copied.

Re:And on the other side

[Jaime2]

What if they gave you $600 and a copy of Microsoft Office?

Re:the rent would be too high

[__aatirs3925]

You know the office storage basement? ....Well, there's a computer already setup there, and it would be a shame if we had to occupy that computer, because of course, it's running Windows ME and it doesn't even have solitaire or access to HSI. In fact, it's connected to a phone jack. You don't HAVE to use your computer, BUT I'm sure you can see where I'm getting at here Milton.

Different HW != unsecure

[bsquizzato]

I see everyone on here commenting about how this would be a nightmare for IT to manage from a security standpoint. I don't really think so. The only area that would suffer is hardware-related support since you're now dealing with a bunch of different computers from all different vendors. So you wouldn't be able to take your broken computer in and get a quick replacement part from your IT folks on site, and that might be OK with a lot of folks, especially at tech-oriented companies.

I work at a large enterprise, and we can install whatever we want on our work laptop to begin with. So me being aloud to install whatever I want is already a "security issue". It's probably like that at a lot of larger tech-based enterprises. The difference is that my IT computer is also running a lot of IT-enforced software that's making sure I keep my system up-to-date and haven't installed anything "bad".

If you don't care about being able to provide IT support for users hardware, you could have employees keep their own computers and just install all the IT-required OS, the BS apps that monitor your computer and push out software updates, the corporate anti-virus, etc. If the computer doesn't meet the IT software standards, then deny it access to the network. There's security solutions out there that can check the integrity of your computer and deny network access if its not up to snuff (google Network Access Control).

Re:Different HW != unsecure

[Jethro]

IT shouldn't 'provide support'. If you want a secure network, IT needs TOTAL CONTROL of the machines. They need to be 100% locked down so that ANY software on the thing was specifically put there by IT.

My point was that if this is the employee's computer, the employee would rightfully assume he or she can install whatever the hell he or she wants on it and inevitably you'll get the viruses/trojans and keyloggers that steal passwords. Along with that you'll get people copying what is supposed to be private information to their own desktop because "it's faster" than going through the VPN. Their unencrypted desktop. With the viruses/trojans/keyloggers. It's just a horrible, horrible idea.

Re:Different HW != unsecure

[Red Flayer]

IT shouldn't 'provide support'. If you want a secure network, IT needs TOTAL CONTROL of the machines.

I disagree. Why not a centrally managed internal "app store" to manage licenses, etc. -- each employee can download any app they choose from the company store. Outside installations would, of course, be verboten.

My point was that if this is the employee's computer, the employee would rightfully assume he or she can install whatever the hell he or she wants on it and inevitably you'll get the viruses/trojans and keyloggers that steal passwords. Along with that you'll get people copying what is supposed to be private information to their own desktop because "it's faster" than going through the VPN. Their unencrypted desktop. With the viruses/trojans/keyloggers. It's just a horrible, horrible idea.

Agreed in full.

Re:Different HW != unsecure

[Jethro]

I disagree. Why not a centrally managed internal "app store" to manage licenses, etc. -- each employee can download any app they choose from the company store. Outside installations would, of course, be verboten.

But can you block people from installing whatever they want if it's THEIR computer? SHOULD you be able to? This is my point, I don't think you have any control of these things if it's not your computer. If your employee paid for it, your employee can do whatever he or she wants with it. If you're somehow forbidding them from installing outside apps, that means they've given you control. Which I don't think would happen with their personal property.

Re:Different HW != unsecure

[VortexCortex]

One word: Rootkit.

How can "IT-required OS, the BS apps that monitor your computer, ... the corporate anti-virus, etc." be trusted if to work properly if the underlying system is compromised?

Rootkit infected systems lie to AVs and spoof OS file system APIs -- they can even BS the "BS apps" into showing "all green, I'm still secure, not leaking any data at all."

No matter the encapsulation method you use, if the outer layer is malicious all interior security can be compromised.

The only way to ensure that I can't take home my computer and install a rootkit is to prevent me from booting my own OS i.e. the hardware would have to use treacherous^Wtrusted computing to ensure only cryptographically signed code can run.

In this event, I can no longer do whatever I want to the system -- it is by definition not "[My] Own Computer", as TFA questions. Given that it's not actually MY computer, I will purchase another machine that will let me do whatever I want and this one will be mine.

I will resist spending any of my own money to acquire/upgrade the other locked down machine, and we'll be in the same boat that we are in now -- Newer personal computing devices, and older devices for work (that I am not allowed to keep upon termination of employment).

Re:Different HW != unsecure

[Red Flayer]

But can you block people from installing whatever they want if it's THEIR computer? SHOULD you be able to? This is my point, I don't think you have any control of these things if it's not your computer. If your employee paid for it, your employee can do whatever he or she wants with it.

Sure, you make 'em sign a use agreement for company networks. translate(legalese): "Any device connected to company networks is subject to blah blah blah and must have the company security policy applied to it".

Employees can then choose to use employer-provided crap hardware that has the security policy applied, or their own stuff that has the security policy applied.

Re:Different HW != unsecure

[Jethro]

Why on Earth would a user want to pay for (obviously more expensive) hardware they won't be allowed to use however they want? Why would any user ever agree to that?

Re:Different HW != unsecure

[Jaime2]

This model always leads to one of two endpoints:

1. IT does exactly what you say and it takes years to get anything implemented. People are stuck on Office 2000 and Windows XP until 2015. New business initiatives become expensive if they require software. IT becomes the "No" part of the organization. This results in a secure system at a moderate real cost and very high opportunity cost.
2. IT tries to be as responsive as possible and compromises a bit, perhaps some high priority software is allowed on the network with minimal testing. This happens a few hundred times each year.

So, you get either a non-productive secure system or a productive insecure system. As always, the real answer is somewhere in the middle. Model 3 is end user systems that take important basic precautions like the installation and updating of antivirus software and have inventory management software so that the Asset Management department can account for licenses. In this model, it is assumed that end user computer may be compromised, so security systems are placed throughout the network. You end up with a system that is cost effective and productive.

Model 3 is very conducive to employee owned devices. Simply mandate that they have the standard anti-virus package installed and that regular software inventory scans are done and let them do what they want to do.

Re:Different HW != unsecure

[bsquizzato]

Obviously there will be a balance between security and usability. There's always going to be the ability to crack the system if you really try hard enough. For most enterprises, securing confidential information is just going to be the task of employees being responsible with their data, rather than ultra-paranoid IT enforcements. If you are handling data that is that sensitive, your computer should be on ultimate lockdown and probably just not leave the office at all.

Re:Different HW != unsecure

[Red Flayer]

Because some people value being productive over maintaining absolute control over their hardware.

Re:NO!

[jeffmeden]

You're right that there is no way to guarantee security without extreme measures (see, the DOD) Instead, it's about support volume (and the related costs). If you get one or two incidents a year involving a broken computer (with security implications) with a "closed" system that takes reasonable security measures, it's a lot more cost effective than fighting 1 or 2 incidents a *day* as users find more effective ways to break their own computers. Also, the threat profile (i.e. the likelihood that the breakin resulted in a measurable loss for the company because the attacker was able to make off with valuable material) is a lot smaller.

Sure, attempting 100% security is going to cost 100% of your resources and still not going to be 100% effective. However, once the "cost" slider leaves 100%, how far down do you want it to take the "Effective" slider?

I love my company

[Capt_Morgan]

When I need a new laptop I send them the specs of exactly what I want.. .then they buy it and ship it to me. I then install the OS from scratch and put whatever I want on it (including some corporate softwarre we have licenses for like MS Office and such) The joys of working from home :-)

They're talking about using virtual desktops

[Chirs]

Pretty much all the companies mentioned are using virtual desktops. That is, the physical device is essentially a glorified terminal for the purposes of work. The connection to the "real" corporate machine is an encrypted session to a central server.

So they don't care about viruses because there is nothing directly on the unencrypted network. They don't care about support because anyone with nonstandard hardware is responsible for their own support, and the corporate support only handles the contents of the virtual machine.

So they don't care what you're running in terms of a physical device as long as you can connect to the central server to do the "real work".

Re:They're talking about using virtual desktops

[Bryan3000000]

What about things like software keyloggers on the hardware? Otherwise, I'm all for it, especially in environments that do not by nature deal with sensitive data, where the people are somewhat tech savvy and trustworthy, you do not need powerful workstations for graphics/video, and you do not necessarily care whether they project a professional image with their equipment (sales). Yeah, that leaves out quite a lot unfortunately. But it absolutely can work, and work well in the right environment.

Re:They're talking about using virtual desktops

[c 0xFF]

Which renders the whole thing moot anyway. Why mess with allowing personal computers ... just use the 10-yr-old ones you already have!

Re:They're talking about using virtual desktops

[Jaime2]

What about things like software keyloggers on the hardware?

Of course, computers with the company image can never get one of those. Given that most large companies still use IE6 and IE6 has some security flaws that will never be fixed by Microsoft, every computer has swiss cheese security. Factor in the number of zero day exploits and slow fixes by vendors and it's quite obvious that the standard security posture has to already account for rooted workstations.

Re:They're talking about using virtual desktops

[Bryan3000000]

If workstations are already rooted and have keyloggers and worse, then there is no such thing as a security, and any security posture is simply posturing. No password is secure, no two-factory authentication is secure, one-time pads are compromised, and biometrics are a joke.

So yes, I quite agree that a sensible security posture includes assuming perimeter breaches everywhere. For many applications, that's definitely good enough. But for many others, a regulatory framework or even real-life concerns must dictate that a silent key-logger and screen capture compromise may be enough to sink a metaphorical or perhaps even real-life ship. In these cases, even though it can never be 'good enough', it's still necessary for the large enterprise/government/whatever to own and fully manage the clients.

Small, low stakes, decentralized operations are the only real answer to this, because such systems offer the most robust recovery and continuation of the whole. Such operations minimize the impact of security breaches. In other words, it can be a great benefit to have a working hodge-podge of loosely coupled independent and not really even compatible systems. This is in many ways antithetical to large enterprise however. That's why I personally prefer the small.

Re:They're talking about using virtual desktops

[Jaime2]

If workstations are already rooted and have keyloggers and worse, then there is no such thing as a security...

That's a false dichotomy. All but the most sensitive organizations can get by just fine with a few compromised workstations. A compromised workstation is only a threat if it can connect to its command and control network. The tools used to protect organizations from typical security problems that happen even with corporate controlled hardware are perfectly adequate to deal with employee owned hardware.

The real problems are a lot deeper. First, people in IT are often serious control freaks. This doesn't come from a stereotype, I've personally seen a lot of decisions in IT that can only be explained by the person in charge being unable to share power. Second, is the separation of security from the rest of IT. If someone is only responsible for security and not productivity, then all of their decisions will be more conservative than if they had a broader responsibility. Creating the position of Chief Security Officer virtually guarantees draconanian measures. Third is hubris. The very statement that "If I control it, it will never get a keylogger" should be grounds for dismissal. I could name a half dozen pieces of software my company uses that make it impossible to properly secure a workstation. How do you prevent malware when application A requires unfettered Internet access, application B requires admin rights, and application C only runs on XP, and none of the three run on Citrix? We officially support over nine hundred and fifty applications on our network.

Having employee owned hardware actually helps because it frees IT from the energy wasting quest to secure the network from the workstation up. If you design your network with the built-in assumption that the workstations are untrusted, you are better off.

BTW, among our corporate standards are; we run XP, all users are local admins, and most software installations are done by the end user. We have fifty thousand workstations. If a workstation acts the slightest bit funky, we re-image it. Yet, I've never worked anywhere that had less of a virus problem than we do. Other issues brought up in this thread are also easier to deal with, like asset management. When a vendor comes into a typical organization and asks how many copies of application X are installed, a lot of companies have to go through their logs of what was installed where and match that up to the list of computers that are still active on the network. Inevitably, someone forgot to log an install or an uninstall somewhere and an exhausive search has to be performed anyways. We simply pull up a list from our inventory software and we know exactly where it is installed. By giving up control of installations, we are much more reliant on crawling the network and reporting, which makes us a lot more accurate.

The really interesting part is that I work at a small location that is managed somewhat separately from the rest of the company. At our site, we manage things more traditionally -- users are not admins and IT does all installation and configuration tasks. However, we are responsible to hit the same metrics that the rest of the company does. We consistently come in way behind in client satisfaction and below average in security compliance. It's not that we are bad at what we do, it's that rest of the company is really good at it.

Re:They're talking about using virtual desktops

[Bryan3000000]

I was kind of agreeing with you there. I'm hoping I can take some major steps in that direction in the position I recently started. Mostly because IT should not devolve into license accounting and hand-holding.

Force employees to buy their own junk?

[grikdog]

The first step is semi-rational, the next step is coercion -- outsourcing company costs onto payroll. Why not just force IT to take employee recommendations on what IT should have bought in instance one?

no

[geekoid]

Not ever.

Besides, in most cases a 5 year old computer is fine.

If ti compiles slow? let your supervisor know how much longer it takes you, then go about your job. If they want to pay you for the extra 10 minutes of compiling time, then so be it.

You do NOT need the at least, greatest all the time. N matter how much we want it and come up with reason we think we need one.

Of course, you also can't claim separation from work and home, so any ideas you write up, or code may become the companies.

To sum up:

No, nada, uh-uh, no way jose, nyet, nein, non, forget it, sorry charlie, bite me, ain't no way in hell.

you don't get it...they're talking virtual desktop

[Chirs]

All the real work happens on a virtual machine running on a central server farm. Everyone logs in over the network and gets a locked-down uniform corporate virtual machine.

It doesn't matter what physical device the employees use to connect to the server, since from the point of view of the employer nothing important happens on the employee's device--it's just a terminal.

Replace hard drive

[Anonymous Coward]

For years, when I have changed jobs, on day one I remove the companies hard drive and replace it with my own. I load the machine the way I want with what I want. When it is time to move on, I put their original drive back in the laptop and hand it back. I've never had anyone complain.

Re:Replace hard drive

[toddestan]

Did they know you were doing this? A lot of companies would not be comfortable with the idea that you'd be walking away with a hard drive that likely held confidential information.

Umm, what?

[Kjella]

IT costs vs human costs have gone down, down, down and this trend is likely to continue. The tools to manage a large group of machines through Group Policy or other means are becoming more and more advanced with minimal staff supporting a huge number of computers. Of course you could have your employees bring in their own computers and use tons of company time - or IT time - to meddle with their computers, because that's work now right? This goes against all sanity of why you have support departments in corporations, it's not because you couldn't have them do the janitor and cleaning duties on rotation. It's because you want them to do their job, which they're hopefully good at and that you're paying way too much for them to go around playing jack-of-all-trades. And I swear in practice some of the smarter people would become the "go-to" guys which will clog up their time, when they should have been busy making the company money. But please tell me companies that are considering this so I can short them.

Hell No

[mjcb]

The first thing I did when I took over as the Network Administrator at my workplace was put an end to personal computers in the office. The company makes enough money that if we can't afford to give an employee a usable workstation, then we shouldn't be hiring anyone. If you want to bring in a new keyboard or mouse, that's fine with me, but anything else isn't happening When I need to work on a computer or have to wipe it due to a virus or whatever, I don't want to have to waste my time backing up music collections or pictures or crap like that. The first thing I tell a new employee is that the computer is the property of the company, so if you want to load personal stuff on there its at your own risk.

Compter vs Salary

[RichMan]

Your company needs to seriously rebalance its internal strucutres if the productivity of a >$50k salaray employee is being impacted by the failure to make a yearly $2k investment in hardware. The simple numbers say a 5% increase in employee productivity justifies the expense.

If the problem is staff funding vs IT funding the managers need to escalate it. Save on the staff funding by doing the IT funding. If the company can't do the math and do the rebalancing then it is a bad corporate structure.

Re:Compter vs Salary

[PPH]

every time my IT guys replace my laptop it takes 6 hours for me to re-configure it

Your problem, not theirs. You are (in many corporations) expected to use the standard install image with no customization. Having support people trying to figure out were the icon for a particular function is on each person's PC is considered to be a major support cost. In some cases, the procedure for fixing a suspected configuration error begins with reloading the IT-approved standard desktop image.

Where I used to work (Boeing) there was talk of shared cubicles, with standard staplers, paper clips and, yes, PCs. So that employees loaned in to projects could just sit down in the first available space and go to work. Being able to fiddle with your desktop was not expected. In fact it was discouraged. If you had a job that needed something more than the standard application suite, the question was raised as to why that particular function hadn't been outsourced.

Re:Compter vs Salary

[Anonymous Coward]

agreed. moreover, providing decent quality equipment for staff can often be a cheaper incentive than salary. in a previous job, a colleague was heard to say he'd miss "his" decent laptop more than he'd miss the company if he left!

a good PC costs less than $1500 and should last 2 years, perhaps spending $20 per year to replace the mouse and keyboard as it wears out. unless you're running a sweatshop, that's trivial compared to wages/salary.

OTOH, I just started working for an organisation which seems to think that buying the cheapest computers for staff (and we're talking maybe 50 employees) and wasting the IT support team's time is a good way to run a business. Whether I last there very long I don't know :-(

Re:Compter vs Salary

[confused one]

Sadly, all too many of us work in that environment.

Re:Compter vs Salary

[oheso]

Golly! If I buy the guy a $2k computer he'll be 5% more productive, and that means I'll make 5% more off him? So suppose I can spend $2.5k and he'll be 15% more productive ... In my line of work, there's not such a direct relationship between processor speed and corporate revenue.

make a business case

[Chirs]

The company cares about the bottom line. If your productivity is noticeably impaired, make a business case to your boss for a faster machine. A thousand bucks gets you a pretty decent machine these days.

Re:make a business case

[Kitkoan]

The company cares about the bottom line. If your productivity is noticeably impaired, make a business case to your boss for a faster machine. A thousand bucks gets you a pretty decent machine these days.

$500 these days can buy you a decent machine that will run most office software (outside of heavy 3d graphics). They are upgrading the computer, and only need to buy a new tower, not new keyboard, monitor, ect... Letting the boss know that its that kind of cheap to get that big of an improvement in work speed and ability helps you get the tools you really need.

Re:make a business case

[Hobbes_2100]

$500 these days can buy you a decent machine that will run most office software (outside of heavy 3d graphics).

Unfortunately, when IT departments insist on loading crapware, even substantial machines can grind to a halt.

Attached strings can go both ways

[Midnight Thunder]

This story is about the opposite. Using employee purchased equipment to be used for work.

It is, but it creates a gray area that I would rather not deal with. If the company wants to stay competitive, then it should be investing in its own hardware and keeping it up to date. If they want me to buy my own equipment for work, then they better make me a voting investor and sign a contract restricting them access to the contents of the PC, otherwise I will look for another job.

Re:Attached strings can go both ways

[Eivind]

Furthermore, especially for technical workers like programmers, decent equipment is a must.

It would be idiotic of a company to pay ~$100K/year in salary + $20K in attached costs + ~$10K for offices, training, food and so on -- and then give me sub-standard equipment. An *excellent* computer with two good screens for programming is what ? $2500 ? And has a practical use-time of 2-3 years. That's not even 1% of the total cost.

If I get -1%- more done in a year with good equipment, then it's worth it. Should be a nobrainer.

Some companies don't have brains. It's better not to work for them.

Yes.

[degeneratemonkey]

It seems like this practice would be unfair, undesirable and impractical in many - if not the vast majority of situations. Personally, I work in a very small startup company and everyone here has a blurred separation between work and personal life. To be stingy with my time or personal resources would be to guarantee failure, and I expect (and receive) the same attitude from my constituents.

Of course we are a software company and we aren't plagued with IT support issues due to our relatively competent internal knowledge. In any case, it is very one-sided and cynical to suggest that there is never a good reason to leverage an employee's personal property (at their own discretion, of course) to mitigate operational costs.

Common occurance...

[sdguero]

I have never worked somewhere that officially supported Apple products on their network. And yet, I've always known a few engineers that brought in their Macbooks and got them working. Same goes for non-blackberry smart phones. You can't expect IT to support every piece of hardware and OS on the planet, but you can expect to get some help with server names etc. if you want to do the grunt work on your own hardware.

Re:Sometimes you want to use a computer you know..

[googlesmith123]

One of the more interesting ideas I've had in a while was that if I was ever hired by someone who wanted me to use a windows laptop. I would sell it and buy a mac. Just because I've spent far too much time fighting windows to ever want to see it again.

Like at the university I go to, it takes 2-3 minutes to log onto a new windows machine, while you can log into a linux machine in a matter of seconds

This is a windows only shop...

[sillivalley]

Until director-level folks, CEO, CFO, other executives, and board members start demanding to use their iPads for things like e-mail and calendars.

About the only defense IT has is to say, "Fine, to do that we have to do a forklift upgrade of our mail/calendar infrastructure -- $xxx,xxx."

But when the CEO and CFO say, "do it," you do it.

Oh, and don't start on those weirdo creative types in marketing and documentation that bring in their own Macs anyway...

Some businesses, rather than going neurotic about access controls are instead asking, how do we enable employees to use the best tools for their jobs? Yeah, some can get away with XP on a Pentium box. Others want Linux and command lines. Others go for Macs. An iPad can be nearly deal for an exec that lives by e-mail and calendar and doesn't do a lot of content creation.

Figure out how to give people access to the tools that work -- for them

Re:This is a windows only shop...

[speculatrix]

zimbra mail and calendaring work fine with iphone, ipad and ipod touch out of the box for free.

Re:This is a windows only shop...

[sys_mast]

That is right in line with a big corp around here that has shifted all new development over the last 2-3 years to MS Visual Studio and Dot Net.

So then then the CxO's decide to buy Macs

And then the developers somehow get Macs, to work with their visual studio of course.

(Palm hits forehead just remembering the setup)

PS yes I know about MONO and that new Macs are x86, that's not the point.

Re:Bad idea...

[anyGould]

And as someone who used to bring his home laptop to work (it was either that or be without a computer for half the day - a whole other WTF story), my Rule 1 was: my computer, my software. You want anti-virus on there? OK, that's reasonable - but I control the settings.

When we got proper IT staff, the first thing they did was get me a work laptop (for the obvious reasons you mention above). And I was OK with that. But I definitely burned out my machine faster than it normally would have (considering it was on and running 16 hours a day for two and a half years, not surprising).

I think the "bring your own stuff to work" idea is a non-starter. Peripherals on your computer (mice, etc)? Sure. Smartphones? Maaybe. But actual laptop/desktops? I doubt it.

NO WAY IN HELL.

[Chas]

Anyone with any sort of managed IT infrastructure should shit a brick at this.

Sure, it SOUNDS nice, until the first time you have a non-compliant user. How do you enforce your security policies on hardware that your company does not own?

What's more, you now are taking up responsibility for a massive heterogeneous environment. While EQUIPMENT costs may go down, support costs for a huge variety of systems, operating systems, and compatibility issues with various OEM/VAR add-ins would shoot through the roof.

Office Drone's Schlibovitz 9000C has one of the company's important apps continually crashing. No logs. No error messages. Just BOOM. Back to desktop.

Why? Dunno.
Is it hardware issues? Dunno.
Is it software issues? Dunno.
Can we reproduce it on an identical machine? No.
Why not? No identical machines.
Can we reproduce it on another machine? No.
Why not? Other systems, like the HappyPuppy 3407 run it just fine with no errors. As does the HugeHonkinHeatsink 2600.

If it's a software issue, what do you do? Tell the owner they have to buy another computer or different software/OS? Good luck!
If it's a hardware issue, who foots the bill for replacing the hardware?
Who foots the bill for discovering what the hell the issue actually is in the first place?

How do you get backups from someone's personal machine that may get shut down every night?

How would you retain any moderately sane IT management personnel when you're asking them to essentially asspull the entire environment and "wing it" when problems crop up. You certainly couldn't pay ME enough to oversee that kind of mess.

Re:NO WAY IN HELL.

[Chas]

Cheap and simple * 1 = Cheap and simple.

Cheap and simple * 1000 = Not so cheap and not so simple.

And it's still cheaper and simpler to lock down and control all my endpoints with company-owned equipment. This way I have a known hardware and a software config I can easily clone.

Number of machines I have to troubleshoot to make sure everything works? ONE.

Time to deploy? As fast as I can load the image on there.

Re:NO WAY IN HELL.

[Roger Lindsjo]

It might be easier for IT with one set of hardware and software, but that set might not fit all the workers. Should that set work for CEOs, secretaries, software developers, hardware designers... Also will, you focus on hardware for the sales people traveling 100days+ per year or the architects drawing the new Boeing?

Sure

[benjamindees]

I've pretty much been on all sides of this issue, from being the under-resourced BOFH who wants to enforce standards, to being the newbie stuck with a six-year-old junk computer, to seeing the incompetent corporate purchasing of brand new systems that are inefficient, incompatible, or don't last two months in operation.

I say go for it.

Give employees a choice: 100% on your own, or 100% supported. Negotiate access to shared resources through open, standard protocols. Segregate in-house resources onto their own network; firewall off and monitor everything else. Make sure IT has the resources necessary to do the job. Put the people who buy their own at the end of the line for support requests.

It can definitely pay off and end up being win-win for everyone.

of course they should buy their own computers

[hypergreatthing]

Are you suggesting that companies should gift them home computers instead?
O that's right, you want to cut costs by mandating employees buy tools needed to do their own jobs. Sounds like a plan, pay everyone like a consultant accordingly. Woops, there goes your savings.

Re:of course they should buy their own computers

[Thing 1]

When I worked in restaurants at an early age, I was surprised that I needed to purchase a new pair of pants in order to start my job. With what money? Same applies here...

ADDENDUM

[Chas]

Now, if we're talking about SOLELY running through Terminal Services, Citrix, Go-Global or some other app publishing/desktop sharing medium that changes things a bit.

But somehow I double many situations are quite this clean-cut.

It's a horrible idea - for the employees

[mdarksbane]

You are opening up your home machine to corporate exposure.

You are now completely responsible for any an all data loss or theft due to hardware failure or viruses.

You are essentially renting them time on an asset that you paid money for, for free.

And that doesn't even touch on what kind of a messy situation you could run into if you were fired, or the company comes under investigation for something, or has an audit, or you end up suing them yourself.

Just don't do it. Infrastructure is cheap compared to the brain you're paying to sit in front of the computer. Make them buy you a new system or live with your reduced productivity.

Not on MY network

[petes_PoV]

The only stuff that goes on our company's network is company kit. Bought, maintained, documented, tested and secured according to company standards and used as the company sees fit. You want to put your unknown, incompatible, unsecure toys on it - go start your own company.

You know what's really expensive?

[trollertron3000]

You know what's really expensive? Office furniture. Maybe employees could buy their own..

In all seriousness, if the cost of business is too high for you then you're doing it wrong. Perhaps business 101 is in order where you learn to pass the cost of doing business to the customer for a price. You know, that whole thing called "business".

A horrible idea for many reasons.

[jtownatpunk.net]

1) Ownership is critical. If an employee quits, how do you deal with the issue of company data and IP on someone's personal desktop/laptop? "Sorry, Bob, you're going to have to leave that here so we can securely wipe the hard drive. Including all of your family photos, music, and that novel you've been writing." Yeah, good luck with that. Same situation if you fire them.

2) Anything outside the tested/proven hardware and software configuration is a PITA. I've got 4 flavors of workstation. If there's a problem with a workstation, I can replace it in about an hour. And that's my "Scotty" estimate which assumes something more important (read: A VP with a printing problem) will interrupt me at least twice during the setup. Blast an image, apply updates, configure their mail, deploy. If I have to do a custom load of XP or Win7 (or freakin' Vista), it'll be half a day. Assuming I can get the OEM install discs for the OS. And they'll probably be pissed that 10 years' of un-backed-up family photos just got wiped out. Nevermind having to deal with operating systems that can't connect to a domain or aren't compatible with one of our software packages.

3) Who's responsible if it breaks? I sure didn't authorize a $4000 six-core, RAID-0 SSD, 16 gig, SLI-video beast for QA Intern #3 but QA Intern #2 just spilled his ultra-venti quintuple-shot skim mocha late on it and all the smoke leaked out. "Sorry, kid, sucks to be you. Help yourself to a DECWriter."

I could keep going forever but any one of those is a dealbreaker. Three and four year old workstations do the job just fine. Hell, the vast majority of office drones are doing the same things with their computers now that they were doing 10 years ago. Email, word processing, spreadsheets, and surfing the web. Any P4 or better with a gig of RAM will get the job done. The few people in my company who actually need more powerful machines already have them. I've been rockin' the same P4 at work since 2006 and it does everything I need. Heck, I'm running Windows 7 and Office 2010 on it for testing and evaluation and I just opened an excel document from a cold start (excel hadn't been run once this boot) in 5 seconds. A warm start with the same document took less than 3 seconds. No SSD, no quad-core CPU. Just an old single-core P4 and an 80 gig hard drive set to "quiet".

Re:NO!

[Excelsior]

My home computer runs Linux, and many of us run Linux or OSX, particularly in technology companies. Our computers aren't malware and virus infected. Using them is not going to hurt "your network". The fact that you call it "your network" alone should give us pause.

Corporate asset managers like you are the very reason why large companies are painful to be an innovative developer at. You are the reason why startups with 10 developers often have an advantage over gigantic companies with thousands of developers. You think that your safety blanket of Windows XP with a mountain of scanner software churning cycles, a ten year old IE 6 browser, and policies that neuter the OS significantly to disallow the computer to be used by anyone for anything, is the ONLY WAY. Running an alternative desktop that starts out secure is unacceptable because you read a CIO Mag article 5 years ago that told you the TCO is higher.

Sorry to go on a tirade, but it's just very frustrating.

Legal Discovery Issues

[steve buttgereit]

I'm not sure if anyone has mentioned this; but there can be issues if the work you do involves information that could be subject to discovery phase in litigation or other legal matter.

FYI IANAL... I could be badly mistaken on this. But...

Depending on the controls being actively enforced, and perhaps regardless of them, documents can be copied from Citrix (et al) environments to the personal computer; this is often times more convenient, especially if you're not near a network. If a subpoena is issued for all devices where the work took place, it is conceivable that your personal equipment would be subject to that discovery effort. I think this would be more an issue in regulatory investigations, and even occasional work could put you in that bucket.

Anyway, I keep my devices strictly separate (laptops, phones, etc.)... and I do have the option of using personal gear (and would prefer it)... but want to avoid those issues.

Cheers,
SCB

Bad idea...

[Ynsats]

...not because it's just a bad idea to provide cutting edge equipment to do the job. It's a bad idea because of one thing...legal liability.

Right now, companies all over the world, are battling governments, civil rights unions, employee unions, activist organizations and so one over the idea of personal privacy. Personal privacy doesn't really exist but we like to make up the illusion that it does by saying something is mine and you can't have it or tell me what to do with it. It's mine, mine, mine, all mine, keep your grubby hands off it you evil, faceless corporation!

That's all well and good until it comes time to clean up a mess like a data spill or a hostile attack on a system. See, corporations have a much easier time enforcing computing policies when they provide the equipment, network and other computing equipment for their employees. When they own the equipment, there is no longer a question of "civil rights" because of the idea of private property. Just like you, at home, reserve the right to limit public access to your home and all the things you have in and around it in any way you see fit, so do the corporations. Democracy stops at the front door in the interests of the more bureaucratic but often more efficient hierarchy of a private, tiered dictatorship.

When the company owns the equipment, if they allow you any level of personal use or personal privacy beyond the minimal amounts that most labor laws require, it's by courtesy only. They can tell you what you can and can't do with their private equipment. That extends to whatever security, anti-virus, anti-malware and proxy level they choose to instantiate in their systems to protect company assets and property. Sure you can lobby against it and whine like a petulant child but in reality, you don't have much of a foot to stand on.

If you allow workers to use their own machines, you open a gigantic security hole as well a massive logistical problem in maintaining and securing your networks and shared resources. How do you ensure that users are keeping their systems up to date with patches and updates? How do you ensure they are using a compatible version of an OS? How do you even ensure they are using a LEGAL copy and not a pirated version rife with back doors and other little nasties? What do you do about limiting network access? You could use a VPN system with something like RSA's SecureID system but then you are talking massive amounts of system overhead with poor network performance.

There is a host of problems associated with the idea that I could list for hours. Those are all technical. They do not even address the human factor. Even as it is now, when one employee gets a system upgrade while another languishes away in obsolete-system-land, it starts petulant in-fighting and envious behavior until the other employees are satiated. That only lasts until the next round of upgrades. What happens when Joe is still stuck with, say, a Dell C600 'cause that's all he can afford after paying Little Joey's college tuition and Ned comes in with a brand new MacBook Air? The jealousy will still be there. It will probably foster dissent about Ned's level of compensation vs. his perceived contribution as well. That bring a whole new mess of problems for HR. You're no longer managing people as much as you are babysitting them.

Maybe there is a bottom line benefit to the idea. However, people have an amazing affect on a bottom line in ways that most management seems to have an inability to comprehend. I'll leave it all at that because I could easily go on for pages about this. Especially since I'm one of those system security weenies that would have to deal with the aftermath of implementing such an idea. The words nuclear holocaust come to mind to describe what the networks would look like afterwords.

Im still running Windows XP.

[unity100]

apparently someone forgot the rule of i.t. : "if it aint broke, dont fix it"

Re:Im still running Windows XP.

[Roger Lindsjo]

Maybe I missed the irony, but using the same rules you cook over open fire on only travel by foot since "if it aint broke, don't fix it" and just new solutions being better would not be a reason to start using them?

Re:Im still running Windows XP.

[Ash-Fox]

apparently someone forgot the rule of i.t. : "if it aint broke, dont fix it"

But Windows XP is broken.

Re:Im still running Windows XP.

[unity100]

it works. from top level, gpu tolling gaming, to using development tools. i dont need anything better.

My home equipment isn't that great

[mdf356]

Yeah, I didn't RTFA, but my equipment at home is slower and cheaper than what I have at work. I don't own a smartphone for work or personal use. I don't have a quad-core box at home or a 30 inch screen, but I do at work.

So no, I don't think I want to use my personal equipment for business use, since it's not adequate to the task.

Re:you don't get it...they're talking virtual desk

[jimicus]

Even then, it's a huge security issue. Unless literally every piece of core infrastructure is firewalled off so it's inaccessible except through the virtual infrastructure (which I can't see happening), you'd have people bringing in all sorts of malware.

I don't want to support your personal stuff

[huckda]

Supporting standardized EQ in a business takes enough co-ordination and time and effort...
throwing in your random techno-gadgetry and virus/spyware laden personal laptop/desktop and I quit...

Re:I don't want to support your personal stuff

[Todd Knarr]

Which is odd, because where I work it's my personal computers that have never had a single bit of malware detected on them in 25 years and the company computers (never mine, because I run it like my personal computer as much as possible) which are constantly needing to be scrubbed of malware that got past the corporate security and anti-virus software.

Maybe not the whole PC

[jonwil]

But letting people (developers especially) pick things like a good mouse and keyboard would be a good thing IMO.

vm

[bhcompy]

I wouldn't mind doing this if the company would provide a virtual machine image which I can operate within so I do not need to pollute my actual PC with all the security software shiat and encrypted drives I need that the company uses. Slap the VM on an external/removable like I do at work already for test environments and you're all set.

Who Be Da Boss?

[b4upoo]

If I can afford better gear than my employer I need to get a better employer.

Re: Who Be Da Boss?

[517714]

If I can't afford better gear than my employer I need to get a better paying employer. I have always owned better gear than my employer provided, I wouldn't have it any other way.

Re: Who Be Da Boss?

[nine-times]

What if the reason you can afford gear better than your employer because your employer saves a bunch of money by not-upgrading gear that's working perfectly fine, and instead dumps that money into your salary?

Still need to get a better employer?

Limit the scope

[DaMattster]

To IT employees and allow them to bring their own equipment in, because ostensibly, they understand security and know how to secure their machines. I am allowed to do this at my job. The alternative is an outdated, outmoded, Celeron D with 1GB of RAM.

Re:NO!

[tayhimself]

I would like to second this opinion. I have a work provided box running Ubuntu 10.04 and personal imac. I am not bring in viruses or ruining the corporate network. Leave me alone and let me work. I don't want to run the work XP image with McAfee and 1 GB RAM. Its worthless. I hope my next job also affords me some flexibility.

Depends

[jshackney]

One of my previous employers (large insurance company) would have completely flipped if I were to even suggest using my own equipment for their work. I was once called into the Director's office for simply changing the background on my workstation.

My current employer (aviation co.) actively endorses the idea. We just don't have the budget or staff (we recently dumped our in-house IT and it's primarily outsourced 9 to 5--even though we're a 24-hour operation--what a f****n' headache!--got a problem at 2am, call back at 9am to get it fixed). They also seem indifferent about the ramifications of all of us mixing equipment. For example, one of the first changes they made was to foist a web application on us that required the use of IE (think ActiveX). We complained, and complained until they (reluctantly) fixed it to work with Chromafarifox.

Re:Depends

[MattBD]

My current employers are also a large insurance company, and they're the same. At present I have to use a ridiculously locked-down copy of Windows XP at work. Seriously, I can't rearrange my Start menu into alphabetical order, it's that bad. Last year I asked the IT helpdesk if they could relax the restrictions as it was actively slowing me down, but I was told they wouldn't because no-one else at my level had relaxed restrictions either. So I have to keep blundering around through the start menu, trying to remember where each application is. However, in November I applied for a Django development job internally (which I didn't get), and the development team had far less restrictions. I asked about what development environment they used, and one of them used his Macbook, and apparently several others had Ubuntu or Debian running in Virtualbox on their work machines.

Virus

[wonkavader]

More specifically, Virus doesn't make a lot of sense to pluralize as Latin since it's not a noun representing a single discreet thing.

http://www.archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/lookup.pl?stem=virus&ending=

Virus mean venom or poison or slime. Just as saying "jellos" or "waters" doesn't make a lot of sense (though there are some situations when we can), pluralizing virus in Latin would be weird. So we borrow it first, make it a complete English word, then we use English rules to pluralize it.

Re:Virus

[Bassman59]

More specifically, Virus doesn't make a lot of sense to pluralize as Latin since it's not a noun representing a single discreet thing.

Surely you mean "discrete."

Re:Virus

[ChunderDownunder]

Outside of North America, 'jello' isn't even a word. So feel free to bastardise it as you see fit!

What you call jello, the rest of us call 'jelly'. I haven't tried American 'jelly' but I presume it's some form of jam or marmalade.

Re:Virus

[DarwinSurvivor]

Jello is NOT a word, it is a NAME. In fact, it's spelled "Jell-O"

Re:Virus

[Anarke_Incarnate]

Also, it is not a jam nor marmalade. Jell-o is a gelatin "treat." It is rather "Meh" at best, as it is a wiggly, artificially colored and flavored hoof concoction.

Re:Virus

[TheRaven64]

I haven't tried American 'jelly' but I presume it's some form of jam or marmalade

In American, jelly, jam, and marmalade all refer to different fruit-based things that are spread on toast. Jelly is completely smooth, jam contains seeds, marmalade contains peel.

Re:Virus

[nine-times]

Well I think Jelly is made of fruit juice but no actual fruit bits. If you put fruit bits in it (mashed up and whatnot), then it's jam. Marmalade is specifically jam of a citrus fruit, which generally includes the peel but I'm not sure it has to.

Re:Virus

[mcornelius]

Jell-O is a trademark and is gelatin (or gelatine), which is completely different from jelly. One is made from skins and bones of animals and the other is made from fruit.

The word jelly to refer to a fruit preserve is not an Americanism. The food is. Jelly is made from fruit juice. Jam is made from fruit. They are completely different products. Jelly is not jam and jam is not jelly.

Re:Virus

[Pooua]

I haven't tried American 'jelly' but I presume it's some form of jam or marmalade

In American, jelly, jam, and marmalade all refer to different fruit-based things that are spread on toast. Jelly is completely smooth, jam contains seeds, marmalade contains peel.

Another important difference between Jell-O and jelly is that Jell-O is a protein and water-based sol, whereas jelly is a sugar and pectin-based gel.

Re:Virus

[wonkavader]

OUCH! Yees, I did.

Re:Virus

[wonkavader]

Surely you mean a gelatin treet.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_XU9x8G7khv0/SiAMzyk0yWI/AAAAAAAAEfY/01fomZ26eRk/s400/treet_l.jpg

Re:Virus

[martyros]

Jelly is completely smooth, jam contains seeds, marmalade contains peel.

When using technical language (i.e., on the side of bottles), jelly is clear (i.e., just made with juice, sugar, and pectin), jam contains actual fruit pulp, but pureed until it's smooth; preserves contains big chunks of the fruit.

But in common usage, "jelly" is the generic term for jelly, jam, and preserves. I've never heard anyone say "peanut butter and preserves sandwich" or "peanut butter and jam sandwich", even if their preferred preserved fruit spread contained pulp.

Re:Virus

[DarwinSurvivor]

Fair enough, but still a *name*.

Re:NO!

[Anonymous Coward]

And fucking prima dona's like yourself are the nightmare of a well run network. (waaah, I can't get samba to authenticate against AD) Get over it. Life does not revolve around you just because you're `special` and run linux. The computer is just a tool. Your personal preference for the fancy or non-standard tool doesn't make sense if the standard industrial one does the job just fine.

In a corporate environment there are large issues to worry about than just you. Corporate security is important simply because one good screw up can cost the company more profits than you'll ever be able to generate. Small startups usually are the target of corporate espionage or have as many disgruntled employees to worry about.

Cost to company

[wonkavader]

Equipment being a high cost to the company is a a bad sign to see in the argument for allowing workers to bring their own computers in.

In an intelligent company, management should understand that the salary of the worker dwarfs the cost of the machine. A slow machine wastes the salary. To not spend the money needed to get every ounce of productivity out of a worker is to throw away money.

This would be a gray area if computers were $6000. However, they're not. If a tech worker has a clunker computer and the company's not willing to buy a $1k computer, then there's something wrong at the company, and brain damage in one area usually means brain damage in a bunch.

Therefore, if you find that you need to bring in your own hardware, look for another job.

rhel/SPICE

[LordMyren]

http://www.redhat.com/virtualization/rhev/desktop/spice/
http://www.spicespace.org/

it's pretty aggressive. just found out about it a couple months ago. QEMU based. they're doing some cool stuff with virtual devices; qxl is their accelerated graphics driver for Linux & Windows, and is probably gonna end up taking over for NX client now that they're closed source. and yes, i am aware there is a difference between a remote desktop and vm.

interested to see how RHEL manufacture disk images for the individual clients; needing a dedicated disk image for each OS is pretty bogus, but fairly common practice.

Re:rhel/SPICE

[Compaqt]

QEMU? Isn't that excruciatingly slow?

The title is unrelated to the story

[SWPadnos]

The title talks about employees using their higher performance machines rather than their work slowpokes.

The story talks about companies changing from using PCs/workstations as the computing devices to using servers with virtual machines and remote access. The actual execution of code is done on the server, so the performance of the remote "terminal" mostly irrelevant. There are benefits to the centralized approach (mainframes, anyone?), but higher performance by using personal speed demon machines isn't one of them.

So what?

[Osgeld]

My work computer is 6 years old, runs XP sp3 and ya know what?

it runs outlook and excel just fine, and after we scraped a bunch of these machines for the suits desktops, that 2GB of pc133 ram are humming along quite satisfactory on this old 1.7GHz P4 even with the 2x AGP card

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

The Rules

[Caerdwyn]

1. If it's MY computer, I'll put all the porn onto it I want. 3 terabyte drive, you say...
2. If it's MY computer, cold day in Hell before I give IT my passwords or allow any sort of monitoring/remote-disable functionality on it.
3. If it's MY computer, I'll take it in and out of the building any time I feel like it.
4. If it's MY computer, I'll put any hardware I want into it. Don't like the noise or puddles from the liquid cooling system I made from a Buick's radiator, or the RF from a Pringles-can WiFi antenna that doubles as a microwave oven to heat my lunch? Long walk, short plank, aluminum foil hats to the right.
5. If it's MY computer, the license status of everything on it is between me and the software publisher and my personal sense of ethics. IT doesn't get a say.

What sane IT department would put up with that? I certainly wouldn't. Security, legal exposure, downtime, compatibility... not a good deal. Conversely, the above rules are MY terms; I am extremely autocratic with my equipment. If the company wants any of the above privileges, we'll talk cash. I'm not going to be a welfare department for my employer. If they're so cheap that they can't afford to buy a new computer every few years when the old one is no longer useful, the paychecks will be bouncing too; companies like that aren't employers, they're bankruptcy cases that haven't filed yet.

Really, it's a lose-lose situation.

Re:the rent would be too high

[NJRoadfan]

Never mind its hidden in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of The Leopard".

Bad idea

[nurb432]

For several reasons that come to mind:

Why should i pay to work? Are they going to fix my PC when it breaks? Upgrade it? Compensate me for depreciation? They going to monitor and control what i do with it?

because people want them

[Chirs]

People have different tastes. This way I can have a macbook, you can have a vaio, the guy around the corner can have a gaming laptop, and if you want to save money you use a repurposed old desktop...and they all connect to the server for doing "real work". Then those with laptops can take them home and watch movies, play games, surf the web, or whatever else.

No, No, No

[MasseKid]

There is NOTHING hard about keeping up with technology in a workforce. At the low end are drafters who make around 35,000$ per year in salary alone. A brand power desktop every year would cost the company only 2,000$, thats less than 6% of the salary cost (probably under 3% of the actual total overhead cost) of the employee. If an average engineer makes 75,000$ that translates to 2.7% of his pay. These figures are absolutely inconsequential. The problem lies entirely with management that believes they are "saving" a little money by making a 75,000$ engineer work on a 15" screen on a computer that's 5 years old.

Re:NO!

[Excelsior]

I didn't say I could only be innovative on OSX/Linux. I can't be *as* innovative on a machine that is completely neutered, and unresponsive. Unfortunately, this is always the case with Windows in a corporate environment due to the policies and software that is put on it to keep it safe.

Safety for Windows in a corporate environment comes at a cost that is so high as to greatly diminish the value of the computer.

Re:NO!

[SanityInAnarchy]

Somehow Google manages...

Re:Sometimes you want to use a computer you know..

[v1]

I use my own computer simply because, pure and simple, it works and i am intimate with it

I'm that way also, I have my own computer (also a MBP) and a ton of gear in my bag. (I have to switch shoulders periodically when walking a distance, I don't pack light) And for the same reasons, that laptop is my main computer, there's not a big primary desktop at home, and I have my laptop set up the way I need it for optimal use.

Last job I worked, I was told they wanted me to have a "company machine" instead of using my own. He cited insurance reasons or something, was a bit vague, but I humored him. (CEO) Asked me to inventory what personal property I used at work. I told him I'd start with my laptop bag. it rang in at somewhere right around $4500 for the hardware and software. (as I said, I don't pack light, I buy quality gear, and I have good software) After emailing that to him, he never brought up the subject ever again.

Before that, way back in '99 or so, I had a powerbook g3 I took to work, and had a boss that flat out didn't want me bringing in my laptop. Back then I was a back room overnight data processor. When I walked in the building, I was carrying the fastest computer under the roof, with 4x more storage than the servers, many times the memory, the only usable scsi interface short of the servers themselves, the only firewire port in the building, the only machine that could burn CDs. (yes, in 1999, a laptop with a CD-R drive, god I loved that machine)

Anyway, I stopped bringing it in for about a week. Then we had a problem with one of the hard drives in the server. Couldn't work on it without downing the server since it had the only scsi interface. A day later the ISDN modem had issues and needed some adjustment and I had the only serial interface it liked. So he told me to bring my laptop back in. And never said a thing about it again.

Lets face it, sometimes an employee has a bit of personal hardware they use at work that makes their job easier, more effective, or sometimes just makes it possible. And some of that time, the company is unwilling or unable to replace it with company property. For me, a lot of it is simply convenience. I could have gotten by without my MBP, but I would have been a lot less effective, much slower to resolve many problems I ran into throughout the day as a support person, and generally would have been a lot less happy with my job. So that's why I didn't mind quite so much bringing in my own personal property. It makes my job more pleasant. And that's an OK tradeoff for me for the company to get the use of my computer rather than have to buy it for me. But so far nothing bad has come of it for me personally. Nobody's attempted to mess with my computer or demand access or monitoring or anything on it. If they tried, I'd just stop bringing it to work, and let the fallout rain down until they gave in or bought me something, as I did with the G3. Most companies are too cheap for that though and quickly give in.

At my current job, I always have my computer with me, and use it frequently. I tried using a company computer, but was far less effective with it, so they leave me alone.

You load 16 tons and whaddya get?

[Buelldozer]

Is the company going to own the town as well as force you to purchase from the company store?

I hate to come off as ridiculous but this is eerily close to the situation behind Ernie Ford's song.

No way!

[drcheap]

My home computer is still a P4 3.2G w/1GB ram and a single monitor. It's getting a little sluggish for my needs these days, but it does what I need it to do.

At work I have a C2D E8400 w/4GB ram, RAID, dual monitors, etc. It's 3 years old, and still sufficient for the work I do, but I can occasionally bog it down with "normal" workloads (i.e. not intentially trying to kill it with a 20 threaded compile or something). I"ll probably be betting a new quad core tons of ram system in 2011 some time.

So no thanks, I'd rather not use my personal device for work :)

Then again, I'm in IT at a higher level, so I still have to support my own system either way.

Re:No way!

[jtownatpunk.net]

Heh. Your description of the work computer takes me back to a conversation I had with one of our developers. I wanted to get an idea what improvements to the developers' machines would provide the greatest benefits. More cores? More RAM? Faster storage? Faster network? I was really hoping for an excuse to build a six-core, 16 gig, RevoDrive X2 beast. Nope. Just faster network access and a faster development server. They've already got gigabit in the cubes/offices and I don't manage the development servers so I don't get to build anything cool.

Re:NO!

[SanityInAnarchy]

waaah, I can't get samba to authenticate against AD

Erm, actually? I can. And if I can't, I'm sure as hell not going to bother IT about it.

Generally, we make your job easier if you've got sane policies to begin with. We're not the ones who will be calling you up and asking you for help logging in because we left capslock on. We're not going to be begging you to get rid of the porn popups so we can give a presentation. We're not going to be whining that our machine is too slow and that you have to update it.

Your personal preference for the fancy or non-standard tool doesn't make sense if the standard industrial one does the job just fine.

It does if I save you licenses and become several times more productive. I don't think I work cheaply enough that it's worth making me several times less productive, or spending several times my salary to hire enough people to make up the difference, just so you can force me into your mold.

In a corporate environment there are large issues to worry about than just you.

I'd think spelling would be a larger issue, but regardless...

You would think the largest issue at a technology company is keeping the developers developing. That's the whole point of the company -- for the developers to develop something, and for the salespeople to sell it.

Actually, your attitude smells much less like "I'm just following policy" and more like "I'm a sad little king of a sad little hill, and to make me feel better about myself, I'm going to exert whatever amount of control I possibly can over everyone else. That's right, bitch, you run XP here because I'm the alpha male!" Or alpha female.

Makes sense for technically competent employees

[Moof123]

As a design engineer I marvel was the crap Dell sold our IT department as an engineering workstation. My beast has Xeon family processors, which jack up the price, but are no faster than an i7 processor. Meanwhile the thing has a terrible video card that chokes on complex 3D models more than my home machine. So Dell sold our IT department on standardizing on a machine that twice as much as my home machine, but has sucky graphics and is no faster for simulations.

So yes, for the 5-10% of folks who really use their machines, and know how to use them, I would love the option of getting a budget to use as I see fit for my computer needs. I do see that for all the clerical drones that it would be more hassle than needed for all involved.

I work for a public inst. and donate quite a bit..

[eepok]

I work for a university and as a means to leave as little a personal financial footprint (we're in a budget crisis, people...), I decline computer upgrades because they're never actually "upgrades", they're "replacements". The departments aren't allowed to spend money on RAM or a video card to increase performance because they'd have to require official tech support (out university tech support) to install it (so tech support can be blamed if something goes wrong). That's just too much hassle in the eyes of the bureaucracy.

So I sneak in my own old, hand-me-down RAM, video cards, and even speakers. No one that cares to keep track of the hardware knows and money is saved. I'd say there's about 6 GB of RAM in computers at this university and prob 3 video cards in offices all over the place that were once my property.

I am leasing my skills, not renting out hardware.

[Jane Q. Public]

I work for a company because of my specific abilities and skills. I am not in the hardware rental business, and I sure as hell am not in the "use my hardware for free" business.

It is considered standard to compensate a delivery driver who uses his own vehicle for the use and mileage put on that vehicle.

In some cases, my computer hardware might have cost more than a decent vehicle. So in the same way, if a company wants me to use my own hardware for work, they had better be prepared to pay me more in compensation. My hardware wasn't "free" to me, and the company should not expect to get it for free either.

Works for me, mostly.

[resfilter]

The equipment my employer provides is "good enough" that I can't justify them paying for an upgrade (it does the job), but sometimes "too slow" for me to use comfortably.. I've been more than happy to provide my own computer from home during my employment.

I like my own monitor and keyboard better than theirs too. It would be unfair of me to request a better keyboard just because theirs doesn't click loudly enough.

I've been more than happy to assume the responsibility of maintainance and upgrade costs myself, if they ever arise, I just use hand-me-down shit from my own computers at home whenever possible, and I tend to write them off my taxes at street value as a subcontractor when possible.

I'd be wary of "You may provide your own computer" turning into "You MUST provide your own computer"... Pretty soon it might be "Please provide your own laser printer and toner". I've run into that before, at the very least, it's made the company very whiny about having to pay for repairing my printer, "I thought he supplied all his own gear?" Just make sure you draw the line in a reasonable place.

In the auto industry, mechanics generally provide most of their own tools, and the company provides a tax-deductable tool allowance, but consumables like greases, rags, and batteries for cordless drills are provided by the company. A mechanic may provide his own air ratchets, but the shop completely is responsible for the infrastructure to connect those tools (air fittings, compressors, etc). That would be a good baseline.

Really stupid

[Pro923]

It's another example of how scientists can be brilliant and yet oh so stupid at the same time. Sales guys get their companies to pay for their phones, cars, vacations, meals, computers - and even taxes to some extent. Have we really gotten to the point that we're dumb enough to let employers trick us into buying equipment that is used to benefit the company? So now it's going to be standard practice for companies to give their engineers sub-par products - to sour the milk - and have them use their salaries to pay for equipment? Somebody please try to use some common sense and outline a procedure that people can use since we're too feeble minded to figure it out on our own. Even if I personally have enough common sense to see reality, the rest of you drag me into the circle-jerk by association.

Re:NO!

[fluffy99]

Being a network admin, I can see both sides of this argument. I've had the secretary who absolutely had to have a Mac because she didn't like Windows. Getting her a Mac increased my workload because I couldn't easily manage it as part of the general network. It also created more work for everyone else who had to deal with incompatible file formats. Lots of minor network changes required walking over to her computer to make sure it still worked (like change the GPO for proxy setting). The best option here in the big picture was to teach her that MS Office on an XP box was just as simple to use, but she was related to a high-level manager so she got her way. Having a homogeneous, centrally managed network is far easier and cheaper from an IT perspective.

I've also had the tech-saavy engineer who like the bsd/linux flavor of the week and wasted way too much of his time with Gentoo when his technical requirements were met just fine with the RHEL we used everywhere else. I guess the primadonna title would fit that guy. He's also the asshole that setup an unauthorized dialup modem so he could get into the network from home. Forcing him to stay with RHEL would have made him more productive and made my life easier.

A non-homogeneous environment simply costs more to maintain. Your IT guys need more experience and they get sidetracked on problems affecting only the outliers. When it's just a few oddball workstations you generally don't develop the tools to centrally manage them and have to manage them individually.

I should also point out that I run a mixed network of mostly Windows and RHEL with a smattering of small embedded linux, bsd,etc. I freely admin that I spend more of my time taking care of Windows issues than Linux issues. A wholesale move to Linux would reduce our productivity enough, even if it's just a little while, so don't even suggest that.

A bit of advice though. Don't make enemies of the IT guys. Keep them good terms with them. Treating them worse than the janitor is a surefire way to get treated like an asshole. If the IT guys know what you're doing and like you, they generally will try not to break things for you. Samba is a good example. Last year when we needed to enforce NTLMv2 only on the Windows domain, I made sure the Linux admins knew because it would break samba unless they had updated. The asshole who told me to fuck off when I asked why he needed a Gentoo box to author webpages got zero help when he couldn't figure out how to update samba.

In my experience...

[SuperCharlie]

The people who want to bring their PC to work..you don't. The people you "might" want to bring theirs to work..know better and won't.

Like this is anything new...

[Anonymous Coward]

I turned down a job in 1985 and the reason I gave them became a huge joke at that company.

"I refuse to work for a company that has lower-grade technology than I have in my basement."

Re:Like this is anything new...

[Lord Kano]

"I refuse to work for a company that has lower-grade technology than I have in my mother's basement."

FTFY

LK

Hell no.

[Lord Kano]

My tech is mine and mine alone. If I pay for it, I'll do what I damned well please on it. An employer has certain rights when you connect to their network and I'm not willing to subject my personal machines to their inspection. If an employer wants me to have a phone to be on call, they need to provide one, I'm not using my minutes to do work.

LK

Re:NO!

[xdroop]

Do you know why IT folks hate personal devices? It is because it isn't IT's. We cannot make rules over what you can or cannot do with your equipment. We can't tell you not to download spyware. We can't tell you not to let your teenage daughter install cute cursor packs. We can't make you buy decent (or any!) anti-virus or security software or force you to stay up-to-date with patches.

And what plusses are brought by personal equipment? Well, we are now on the hook to support your own weird applications, like some graphics package that was downloaded off a Russian server and is entirely in Korean(*). We are now on the hook for keeping your eight-year old second hand clone (built by your son's super intelligent friend) running(*). We have to get the company VPN solution working with your weird combination of hardware and software(*). We are now encouraged to install "field evaluation copies" of corporate software(*) so you can do your job when your not-entirely-compatible open source package(*) causes hilarity.

And, when you ignore all this and corporate security is compromised and thousands of pieces of private data are "accidentally circulated more widely than initially intended", it is OUR ass on the line.(**) Frankly, if I'm the one getting canned when it doesn't work, it's MY F***ING network.

You bringing your equipment in may save you time, but it doesn't save the company any money.

(*) = actually happened to me.

(**) == happened to someone I know.

Re:Bad idea...

[omb]

NO, NO, NO you are living in the age of dinasaurs, and your analysis is totally Windoze centric. I dont have want or care about patch Tuesday, or what ever the hell it is.

The software on my machine is my responsibility, not yours, you may mandate that it must all be legal eg Fedora, SuSe ... but that is it, and if you cant set up a firewalled VPN with NO performance loss you are an idiot.

Dont worry, you need not worry, you and your corporate control freaks are over. NB if you want real security you need to provide a firebreak which does not use computers at all.

As you may have noticed Computers can be hacked eg by NSA, CIA ... so you need to ensure that they cannot get beyond first base.

This is trivially easy, you need a State that permits Corporations with bearer shares, a lawer fiducery, and bank geheimnis; then you establish the Corporation, appoint the fiducery in the name of it, and bank with bankers who will guarentee an account with details written ONLY in a manual ledger accessible only to one or two named officers.

Nothing networked or databased, then you can pyramid that with a second such account, with another bank with the access details sealed from the first. It is easy, and not very expensive and completely uncrackable if you do it right.

Re:NO!

[omb]

YES, exactly right, avoid such loosers.

Re:NO!

[Excelsior]

I'm not suggesting that us bringing our own personal computer into work is the right solution. I'm recommending that IT policy makers look at options that don't make life on a corporate desktop so unbearable that we all want to bring in our own computers. If you chose alternatives that weren't so security challenged that they require you to neuter them, then we wouldn't want to bring in our own computers in the first place. Who really wants to lug a computer back and forth every day? Not me. But I'll take it over the current standard corporate desktop which is nearly unusable.

IT works for the company, not the other way around

[Scott Wood]

That's just what I want, to support 30 or 40 different models, brands, or hell even architectures.

There's a difference between "let's have IT support everyone's personal equipment" and "let's not prohibit people from connecting their own computers to the network". Limit it to people considered technically competent, and feel free to reject support requests where the problem appears to not be on your end -- though don't be too quick to dismiss the idea that the problem might be on your end, particularly when dealing with developers and others who ought to have a clue.

To say nothing of when their own personal laptop that they used to surf horse porn last night brings some nasty viruses to work to test the corporate network.

If someone causes a problem due to carelessness, then maybe they lose the privilege of connecting their own stuff. But don't use the firewall as an excuse for crappy internal security.

And finally, what happens when I tell them "Sorry, you're going to need to downgrade your os/office suite/creativity suite/whatever to be compatable with the tools we've already paid thousands of dollars for and aren't going to get a new license just for your special snowflake hardware there".

Accommodating such differences is a separate question from restrictive policies, though I don't see why it's IT's business if some department wants to pay extra for a special license, or for extra IT manpower. If you're asked to pay for it out of your existing budget, that's another matter.

No thanks. I'm happy with standardized hardware.

I'm glad you're happy. Your users -- who may also be highly valued employees that the company wants to be happy -- may not be.

if you keep facebook and yahoo messenger off it (thank god for corporate virus protection that can prevent unauthorized installers/msi files), it'll run nice and quick.

"Runs nice and quick" is not something anyone would ever say about a Windows computer after IT loads their crap on it where I work. Their Linux boxes aren't slowed down quite as much, but they run old software with lots of weird local IT changes (e.g. they override the already old distribution's version of sed with an even older version. They said it was because they thought someone at some point might have depended on that old version, but they didn't seem to have a clue who or why).

We're not limited in the software we can install. We can, in some instances, wipe the OS and install whatever we want and manage it ourselves. But corporate policy prohibits us from connecting a piece of hardware not *owned* by the company to the network, not even to connect from home over the VPN, not even on a virtual machine dedicated to the task.

Seriously, a 5 year old pendium D with 2gb of ram running XP will tear the fuck out of office 2003 or 2007.

My job doesn't involve running "office 2003 or 2007". Or Windows, for that matter. It does involve compiling large codebases, with compilers that grow ever slower in their efforts to make the generated code faster. It also involves a variety of development and communication tasks that benefit from running up-to-date software.

This is work. Do work.

So, does "Fri Jan 14, '11 03:31 PM CST" translate into work hours in your time zone?

Seriously, it's not IT's job to determine the extent to which employees should be allowed to take a break, or what constitutes "work".

Re:Bad idea...

[Thing 1]

Working from home fixes much of the envy issues.

Re:So who then loses out when the computer goes do

[Scott Wood]

What about time spent unable to work because of a restrictive IT environment? Time spent dealing with an out-of-date OS on which I cannot install newer application software that I need (no, I'm not talking about "time wasters")? Waiting for builds on slow hardware? Not being able to effectively work from home (include here the time I wasted trying, in vain, to get some sort of usable VNC setup on top of the old, IT-managed, company-owned Windows laptop that I'm allowed to VPN with, so I could get to my Linux desktop in the office? I eventually got it working, mostly, but it wasn't usable.)?

You can't treat all employees and all jobs the same.

No way.

[Dabido]

Seen it happen. When I was a network engineer (a long time ago), we needed a new laptop to be able to use to go directly plug into hubs, switches routers etc. We had a contractor working with us and he was always using his own laptop rather than the PC supplied by our work (because the desktops were shite), and the response was the Networks could use the contractors laptop for any remote work we needed to do. The fact that the contractor was using it instead of the work PC was beyond the point, the managers saw a laptop and decided they had free reign to do what they liked with it, even though the knew it was the contractors personal property.

I'd rather resign than let the company dictate to me who can and can't use my personal property and what I can and can't do with it. And for the record, we never did get that laptop we so desperately needed. About a year after I resigned the contractor did too and his laptop went with him. So the networking department was left without a laptop.

Same company wanted us running the network at a Gig, but wouldn't buy us Hubs/Switches that ran at a Gig because they said when we could get the 10/100's running at 1 Gig they'd buy us the 1 Gig equipment.

I can just see this sort of thing breeding more incompetence and laziness amongst managers.

It's coming...

[wwejason]

One thing to consider in the corporate world, for those that can't understand why companies take a while to upgrade hardware, is that you have to consider that all assets, even a laptop, must both be in service for a period of time to make the purchase cost effective, and the lifetime costs of the item (initiail purchase, support) must be realized over a set period of time by the accounting department. Each person can't go buy a new $500 laptop every year (or even 2, or 3). We're completing a global refresh project now with all new hardware (laptops, desktops, and some servers). Typically this is done every 5 years at which time the hardware can be taken off the books and disposed/sold/donated. The new CIO says that in another 5 years, instead of a big refresh project, every user gets an allocation of funds and can purchase whatever hardware they want. BUT, at the same time, we are currently piloting running ALL apps via Citrix XenApp. So while all the Mac freaks will be excited to go buy an overpriced piece of junk, they're just going to be using Citrix! Even Office 2010 and Communicator are in Citrix.

why would your employer give you more than needed?

[Chirs]

It's not what they can afford, but what they're willing to spend. Your employer cares about money. They're going to pick something reasonably cheap with good enough performance to do the job. An enthusiast is willing to spend thousands of dollars upgrading upgrading their machine because they want the speed.

We're getting new machines at work. They're decent, but my coworker just built himself a machine with twice the cpu power, twice the I/O speed, and three times the RAM because he's interested in video editing.

Re:NO!

[nine-times]

Do you know why IT folks hate personal devices? It is because it isn't IT's. We cannot make rules over what you can or cannot do with your equipment. We can't tell you not to download spyware. We can't tell you not to let your teenage daughter install cute cursor packs. We can't make you buy decent (or any!) anti-virus or security software or force you to stay up-to-date with patches.

I agree that this is the problem. In short, we end up responsible for fixing it all no matter what.

You can say, "No, no! The employee will take responsibility for his own system!" But what happens when it's infected by a virus or somehow hacked because of improper precautions? Who's going to be responsible for fixing the problem? If the user can't save files anymore because every byte of their system is taken up with MP3s, who's going to have to clear off the hard drive? If a user getting paid $200/hour is not able to work for want of a $300 desktop computer, whose job will it be to resolve the issue?

Do you want the user to fix these problems? Good luck.

Or do you want me to fix all these problems? Then either let me control the situation, or else give me a huge staff to deal with the chaos that will ensue. The huge staff will cost you more than the money you'll save from not buying computers.

I've seen this work in multiple organizations

[Helen O'Boyle]

I've brought my own laptop to a startup that employed me on a W-2 basis. The idea being, it's already set up with all of my dev and productivity tools, and I'm comfortable with its performance, so why spend $$ on giving someone a duplicate of what they already have (that I'm not using during business hours otherwise), if they're still willing to sign the agreement saying they give all rights to what they do for you in the workplace to the employer? (Note: it's crucial in these situations to make sure that you keep rights to your OWN stuff developed on the same hardware for non-work purposes.)

Another time, years ago, I was stuck with a 486sx PC. I had a Sun Sparcstation at home. I brought in the Sparcstation and was much, much, much more productive for two weeks, until the beancounters spied it and asked WTF? I copped to it being my personal machine, whereupon they directed me to take it home at the end of the day because it ran afoul of their insurance requirements that all in-house equipment be owned by the company. It was only months later that I realized they leased a crapload of machines from GE Leasing, and that I could have suggested, "Why don't you lease it from me for $1/month?", as a way around that if the problem REALLY was the insurance issue they described.

Still another time, I worked for a large tech company. Whilst they were a bit skittish about people's personal laptops being connected to the domain, as long as you went through the setup process to put all of their security software on your machine (and were willing to accept someone else's closed-source security software whose full functionality you could not predict), they tended to tolerate it. Eventually, they got more generous in handing out laptops.

At the same company, they have a policy of allowing personal phones to connect to the Exchange server for email and calendaring purposes. Not everyone gets a company cell phone, but since it's a company full of geeks, most employees have one of their own. Being able to catch up on your email in the morning whilst on the bus to work, and being reminded while you're out at lunch that a super-important meeting is beginning in 15 minutes and you better get yourself back to the office, are valuable things that contribute to productivity. Sure, the company may lose a bit in security by "opening up" their email server to personal devices, but multiple large and small companies I know have concluded that the tradeoff is worth it. Funny thing was, they didn't like iphone, and I THINK they might even have had an official policy against allowing iphones on their network, but since at least 20% of the technical staff at the company (a couple years ago) seemed to use iphones, I'm not sure it was enforced.

At my present employer, only high level managers and up have access to smartphone based email. Some other employees have company phones, but they're not net-access-capable. However, many employees seem to have Apple, HTC, Sony, etc. devices with smartphone functionality -- and many of them could benefit from being able to send "oops, I'll be a bit late, stuck in traffic" to the office, or check their email while out in the field, etc. So I'm currently playing change agent and talking up the benefits of allowing them access to company email from those devices.

Re:NO!

[BoberFett]

Ah yes, the prima donna developer. I knew you'd be along eventually. You're so much more enlightened than those plebes doing the IT grunt work. You're a beautiful snowflake and everybody else is just getting in your way of creating... wait a sec... which idiot developer that said they NEEDED access to the production environment just dropped the customer table?

Security concerns and budgets

[klashn]

Intel has mentioned that this is the future. Intel is very security conscious and I'm sure they will be forcing a home IT build with VPN access along with what they have already, PGP disk encryption. In the future, I'm also sure Remote-wipe will be part of the process.

For the employee, this allows them to choose the laptop that suits them
For the employer, it allows them to push a partial cost of the laptop to the employee. What will be burdensome is the fact that IT will have to support so many builds and hardware.
So I guess, initially the employee will be able to purchase a few subsidized business grade laptops... I'd definitely buy a heavily discounted Thinkpad ;-)
Think about this... All business files/documents are stored in a data center under the employers controll, only to be accessed via VPN, or LAN (on employer's site)...

not a big fan of slashdot's lack of WYSIWYG

No.

[drolli]

yes, sometimes one may do so (urgent email during Holiday), but it should not be required.

I work in a physics lab and i do not bring (and buy) my own soldering iron. I do not buy and Autocad License to do the drawing at work. And if the multimeter at the company sucks i will not bring my private one (even if it would be better). I will go to my Boss and ask for the permission to buy what i need, and explain that if its not given the quality of my output will suffer. More often that not its approved in my experience, especially for hardware. If the way in which the approvals are decided is irrational (e.g. uninformed), it is usually to deeper problems of your boss with leadership (e.g. incompetence in delegating, weak guidance).

My former Boss usually said to me: "you are responsible for the detail, just tell me if you believe that some important Problem can be solved in a specific way, and explain briefly why you think so and why that is important. If we have the money and it solves the problem, do it" ()

My current Boss believes that he understand everything and delays thing where he does not understand the need of endlessly with irrational arguments. Things which he think he understand are bought easily even if they cost 10x more money thank what you asked for.

The funny think is that if i divide budget used per published journal article the ratio is in favor by roughly 20 to 1 for my former Boss (yes, i will leave soon).

The other option is: My company pays me at a freelancer rate, i bring my own stuff, do everything as i think it should be done and go. However i observe a discrepancy between the payment i get and the rate i would get as a freelancer. And this difference is exactly for the

Back in the oldened days...

[PinchDuck]

You had to scrape together a few grand to buy a decent 8-bit system, while commerce hummed along on mainframes. Having more powerful equipment at home seemed like a lunatic idea. I had to beg management to buy an instance of Oracle for a development box. I didn't get it. No companies readily admit that the Android in your pocket beats the hell out of their blackjack, and databases for development purposes are free to download. It is a very cool time indeed.

I WANT to bring my own computer

[SmallFurryCreature]

I never understood people who try to get a new ergonomic mouse through the company. Why bother? The exact model you want is waiting in the shop and you can get it without signing forms. The money? Come on, a good mouse/keyboard lasts years. For pennies a day you get to use the tool you want. No hassle.

And I have been extending that. Want a quality screen to stare at all day with your precious eyeballs? Buy it yourself. Faster HD? Put in a SSD and no longer cause yourself headaches with slow searches etc.

In other industries it is perfectly normal. Any good cook will have his own knives. They are the ones he likes not what some manager squeezing pennies thinks is the best buy. Most carpenters and mechanics have their own tools, often in the form of their own carts completely kitted out with everything they want and need from tools to stereo and coffee machine. Knew one guy who really likes his esperesso, so his tool cart had one build in. Other liked his music and so it had huge speakers build in.

Why do most in IT insist on using the most craptastic HP/Dell crap that can be bought for LOW-LOW prices as our tools of the trade. Even if the company supplies the paint brushes, you can be sure they won't be the ones from the department store on the corner. The right tool for the job, is it such a hard concept?

I have been interviewing for jobs and only ONE company had hardware on the desks that I considered "Nice". Everything else is the same old standard crap. That screen the boss stares at for 1 minute a day is something I will be looking at 8+ hours a day. Why should I have my home machine that I sit only 2+ hours at be significantly better then the office machine? That makes no sense.

Does a professional photographer use an instant camera at work and a Hasselblad for holiday snapshots? No? Then why do you use a IPS screen at home and a LCD at work?

Let me bring my own. It will be faster, more robuust and more productive. Of course, I do expect to be paid for it.

work pc = scrap heap

[MonoSynth]

Since work pc's mostly are more than one generation older than enthusiast's pc's, it might even be feasible to give your own written-off (and unsellable) hardware a second life at work. At home I upgraded my 22" Samsung monitor to a 24" monitor, while my boss still mandates a 19" screen (because 1280x1024 is the target resolution for our product). I brought my 22" screen and a cheap dual-head graphics board to work so now I have 22" for Visual Studio and 19" for Outlook/internet/testing/comparing. Works like a charm while only costing me about 25 euros (for the gpu), which is a lot cheaper than the hassle of getting a work-provided second monitor.

Re:NO!

[xtracto]

Ladies and gentelmen, the Bastard Operator From Hell !

Depends

[TheDarkMaster]

Depends. For someone like me who have vacated house hardware and that hardware is much more powerful than the corporate standard of my company, it would be interesting to use it at work using the company's software and operating system. What after all, you spend much of his life in his work, then it is welcome the opportunity to customize and improve your work place when you can afford it. Of course, this should be optional, those who prefer to follow the company pattern would then use the hardware supplied by the company.

Wheels and wheels (cycles anyway)

[anegg]

This appears to be a classic example of short-sighted, clueless management. It looks like the introduction of yet another money-wasting business cycle (other examples being "outsource things that aren't are core competency versus its cheaper and better do take care of these things ourselves" and "centralized versus de-centralized."

As the management pendulum marking the extremes of each cycle swings from side to side, a new set of managers (immune from learning from the lessons of the past) comes up with brilliant cost-reducing ideas that they can prove will save money (as long as their analysis is shallow enough - which its guaranteed to be due to their lack of experience). These ideas, when adopted, start the pendulum swinging over to the other extreme. The managers, wrapping themselves in accolades, cheers their foresight and win themselves promotions for cutting costs. Meanwhile, the business spends beauceau big dollars and disrupts major internal processes making the change. After some number of years (long enough for the old managers to not be interested anymore due to promotions and/or firings) the cycle repeats, only from the other extreme. (Note - it is not always simple dollar costs driving the swings - there are many other types of business costs that may be cited.)

This is the vocation of many managers - enacting change for the sake of change and promoting themselves rather than identifying true fundamentals and making the business work better.

One company with which I am familiar has just completed totally locking down every employee's desktop/laptop. This was all justified by various levels of management as being absolutely essential to the business, and the only means by which the company could be absolutely certain that the company's information, and that of its customers, could be protected. I wonder how long it will be until the cost of this effort becomes seen as a negative and a move to promote employee self-provisioning of computing tools emerges... of course, there isn't really anything to prevent the company from requiring employees to furnish their own computers but still taking them over and locking them down - is there?

What companies need to do...

[Bai jie]

is stop buying high performance machines for the top executives and only spend that money on the grunts that could actually use that power. Back in my desktop support days I'd groan every time I went into a VIPs office and see an overpriced beast of a machine running excel and outlook. Then I'd go to a programmers area and see the POS 5 year old computer that was given to him and would about pull my hair out. Companies usually have the money to provide high performance machines to their employees, they just elect to give them to the wrong people.

Anything to save a buck

[gelfling]

Pay for it yourself and then be subject to their rules and configurations. Sure. How's that P2P client going to run?

Re:NO!

[rubycodez]

I am a prima fucking donna, and I am part of making things that pull in millions of dollars in sales for the company. I don't ever bother the IT staff; they come to me sometimes for help to troubleshoot complex issues. Funny when the rest of the company is *down* do to Windows flaws, my coworker and myself who run GNU/Linux are *up*. In short, if everyone was like us, 98% of people like you would be out of work while the remaining 2% would only be needed a few hours a month at any one company.

LMFAO

[multimediavt]

"Should Employees Buy Their Own Computers?"

"Companies can struggle to keep up with the constant rate of technological change."

If the company is having trouble keeping up with technology change and even *THINKING* of asking employees to buy their own computers, the company is dying and either needs to make some strategic changes to its products and services or DIE!

Sorry. Some companies are not forever. I should know. I've been involved with quite a few that have died and a few still alive. :-)

This is the Way my Firm Works

[caramuru]

My firm's business model includes part time workers working from home on their own computers. Since these knowledge workers already have computers and high speed internet access AND since all of our applications are web based, why do we need to replicate the employee's hardware/software/service environment? We test applications against IE, Firefox, and Chrome to insure compatibility. Even though we buy all services from the cloud, we need to stay abreast of changes in technology such as smart phone access. Consequently, we have a CIO. Our research shows that security problems are more likely to occur in in-house hosted environments than in SaaS environments. Nothing is fool-proof and vigilance is always requiremed, but our model has been working well so far. Finally, the employees love working at home. We have zero capital requirements and happy employees. What's not to like about that?

But-- did they mention productivity?

[way2trivial]

cause if the guy you are paying 100k a year to to deal with legal issues spends 8 hours on hold with technical support...

sure, IT costs are down, but you didn't get any work out of the guy that day.

Re:But-- did they mention productivity?

[contrapunctus]

what you said makes sense, but also, employees might take care of their machines better (and learn!).

loss of control

[smittyman]

A company should always be in control of their own IT infrastructure, software, security etc. Give that away and you lose your stability and probably your precious data.

In any case, most companies have a 3 year replacement plan of the desktops etc. Looking at the software that you use, a bit of Word, Excel, mail, your computer has been fast enough for many years now.

Keyboard loggers

[Compaqt]

Wouldn't that still leave you open to keyboard loggers?

If you know that Big Company X has a personal (own) computer policy, you just need to target the low-security personal computing devices of a few employees.

BYOC: What is the real objective here?

[derfla8]

The argument for this is a crock. There are plenty of ways to make this work for IT, but at the end of the day please please please don't pretend that it's the employee that wants this. Most employees come to work wanting all the tools they need provided to them. In Germany, this is the law in fact. At the end of the day, business is trying to save another buck and wants to offload it to their employees. And for big business trying to save another buck, you really want your employees spending time troubleshooting issues on their own PCs rather than doing their jobs?

It depends

[Sam Douglas]

I think it depends on the role the computer has for the employees job, and how technically competent they are. If you are talking about programmers or graphic artists etc. and that is important to your business, then you should make sure they have a good computer that lets them work productively, rather than some officially blessed IT department configuration. Give them a realistic level of control and responsibility to configure the computer in a way that suits them. I believe the same applies to the rest of their work space. If the employee wants to use their laptop, it's probably a sign something is wrong with the work environment which needs to be addressed.

Re:why would your employer give you more than need

[Sam Douglas]

I assume the GP means better with respect to doing work. If your employees are having to unnecessarily wait for their software to do stuff, because the company is too tight-arsed to get the best available hardware for the task, then the employee probably isn't working efficiently. If your programmers get coffee while the code compiles, or your engineers are being held up because the CAD software is using all the memory, they probably aren't happy or productive.

Privacy and Legal Concerns

[JustTalk]

With corporations having the ability to silently see and record everything that happens on your computer in the name of security, there are some very real privacy and legal issues to requiring personal computers/devices for business, even if you're accessing remote desktop VMs. Our personal computers have become the place we keep personal income tax, banking, recreational activities, political and philosophical opinions with friends and family, personal health research about our current ailments, and on and on. If a corporation believes an employee or contractor is stealing, you better believe your home PC will fall under the corporate "Acceptable Use Agreement" which gives the corporation the right to snoop anything that attaches to it's network. Most state laws give employers the right to do this with the caveat that they may not "intentionally look" at anything that is personal. But with business and personal all mixed together on a PC, how is it possible for employers to not see large amounts of personal info? Are we all to trust this will not be quietly abused by some employers to discriminate against employees? If you trust that employers will do the right thing, do you also trust that employers will appropriately destroy the data when they are done with it, or store all of those intimate details about you securely (in some nameless service cloud) so that it can't be mined by someone with bad intent? Also, personal equipment can become part of e-discovery in a corporate court case they may have nothing to do with whether you did something wrong. Employees could find themselves giving up an image of their personal PC to law enforcement for court cases their employers are involved in.

Privacy and Legal Concerns

[JustTalk]

With corporations having the ability to silently see and record everything that happens on your computer in the name of security, there are some very real privacy and legal issues to requiring personal computers/devices for business. Our personal computers have become the place we keep personal income tax, banking, recreational activities, political and philosophical opinions with friends and family, personal health research about our current ailments, and on and on. If a corporation believes an employee or contractor is stealing, you better believe your home PC will fall under the corporate "Acceptable Use Agreement" which gives the corporation the right to snoop anything that attaches to its network. Most state laws give employers the right to do this with the caveat that they may not "intentionally look" at anything that is personal. But with business and personal all mixed together on a PC, how is it possible for employers to not see large amounts of personal info? Are we all to trust this will not be quietly abused by some employers to discriminate against employees? If you trust that employers will do the right thing, do you also trust that employers will appropriately destroy the data when they are done with it, or store all of those intimate details about you securely (in some nameless service cloud) so that it can't be mined by someone with bad intent? Also, personal equipment can become part of e-discovery in a corporate court case they may have nothing to do with whether you did something wrong. Employees could find themselves giving up an image of their personal PC to law enforcement for court cases their employers are involved in.

Not acceptable

[Neil Boekend]

I would not run McAfee on one of my own systems.
Unless they pay me enough to maintain a laptop with it and a system I can actually use I would not accept it.

Re:NO!

[witwerg]

No no no. He is not the the BOFH. he's much too tame. A true BOFH, wouldn't even argue with you, he might even let you use your system. But in the end, he'll extort both you (perhaps using doctored up nude photos of you with your fake lover which he could send to your wife) and the company to get you sit under his thumb all while making a profit!

Re:Bad idea...

[Ynsats]

No, if you have a company machine and I am the company owner, it is my responsibility to make sure it is a properly working tool for you be as productive as you can be. You're a number, not a person and we can't trust you to do what you're supposed to do. I mean, your net logs for your Internet access are perfect examples of that.

That's all well and good and is honestly more complex than you are making it out to be. Also, you're missing the backend and how you're going to manage all of that overhead in network switching and security alone. I'm glad you think you have it all figured out but in reality, your ideas will not work as cheaply and easily as you think.

Why? People. Your solution needs users with more than a basic knowledge of computers. In the real world businesses, most lack even a basic knowledge of computers. IT's purpose is so that the profit centers can concentrate on being productive and profitable and not worry about the maintenance of their machine. That's the whole purpose of IT. Create an environment that is stable, fast, easy to use and seamlessly integrated. Once I start having to rely on all you code monkeys to keep your machines updated properly and not install stuff like LimeWire on your company issued laptop, that's when my security posture becomes compromised and is no longer effective.

See, it's got nothing to do with what you think you can and can't do. It has everything to do with my SLAs (Service Level Agreements) and what I promise to deliver in the way of enterprise architecture and infrastructure. If I am not the one maintaining your system for you and I leave it up to you then I spend an inordinate amount of time fixing what you screwed up. That costs me time and makes other proactive projects suffer which costs money in the long run. Both ideas are unsat to any manager looking to reduce costs and improve efficiency. What's worse is that god forbid a user actually owns up to causing the problems they have with performance due to spyware and other fun stuff rather than complain to their managerial unit and blame me for not maintaining my promised level of service. So, since you can't be trusted and I'm not paid to babysit your net surfing habits and program installations, it's more cost effective for me to issue you company owned machines and implement company wide security solutions and usage policies.

Also, you should stop kidding yourself. Whether you like Windows or not, it is still the modern standard in computing environments for the majority of commercial enterprises. Linux is a lame duck for anything but clustered computing and even the big name/house UNIX versions are losing ground as well. Apple is, for all intents and purposes, a relative non-player due to products focus more on the consumer level where a computer is a toy or an appliance more than a tool.

Currently, there is no simple way to implement your ideas in Windows and many companies are reluctant to invest capital in the Windows infrastructure they have than to even think about the cost involved in moving from a distributed infrastructure to thee more individual, non-standard node based model you're suggesting. It might work for a small company with very few employees but once you get past the "small enterprise" levels of employees and systems, it's a logistical nightmare full of security holes.

Lastly, whether I'm being a jerk in your eyes or not, this is reality and unless you can give a long-term picture with a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis beyond just the computing systems, no one in the corporate world is going to entertain your idea. That's just how it is and unfortunately, it's not going to change any time soon because it would require a massive corporate culture shift. When you're dealing with profits, not necessarily money but profits, people are very reluctant to rock the boat and risk that profit on a what if whey know the have now is a quantifiable value.

Re:Bad idea...

[Ynsats]

No, really, it doesn't because there are many other ways for people to be envious of co-workers.

Then again, that's one issue addressed albeit rather incompletely. What about the several other issues I posed as well as the myriad of other issue that have gone unmentioned but are still equally relevant?