

Would you purchase hardware with your own money to use at work? - kylec
http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/95872/would-you-purchase-hardware-with-your-own-money-to-use-at-work-to-do-your-job-bet

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m0nastic
I suspect most decent-sized organizations would have a fit over this. Almost
every company I do work for has a fairly uniform IT setup. Most places have a
standard policy:

\- You can't install software of any kind on your system (unless it's pushed
out through whatever group policy they enable).

\- USB ports are disabled (either physically in the case of government
clients, or just by disabling mass storage drivers through group policy), and
optical drives are read-only.

\- Non work-issued systems aren't allowed on the network, and may not even be
allowed in the building.

\- Most importantly, you can't perform work from a non-work provided machine.
In extreme cases, this includes things like email, but it almost always
includes having company information on a machine that isn't your IT-issued
one.

Most of these policies are created around the idea of limiting exposure of
company-sensitive data (you can insert a joke about going through all this
effort while exposing all your company data through an insecure web
application).

Now, there are I'm sure, lots of smaller companies who don't enforce policies
like that (I work for a really large company that has especially draconian IT
policies, and most of my clients are rather large as well).

Even in the scenario where it wasn't explicitly forbidden, I'd be really
hesitant about buying hardware for use in my job if for no other reason than
it'd make for a potentially awkward situation if I left ("Sure, here's my
laptop, but first you have to let me take out this hard drive that I've been
using, as I bought it myself.")

~~~
kelnos
_Now, there are I'm sure, lots of smaller companies who don't enforce policies
like that..._

I wonder what the tendency is among all companies regarding strong IT
policies. I wouldn't consider working for a company like the one you describe,
but I suppose to each his own. At my current company (mid-stage 30-ish person
startup), I decided when I started that I didn't want to deal with maintaining
more than one machine, so I use my personal laptop to do all my work, hooked
up to a pair of external monitors the company provides. I _really_ like this
arrangement, and wouldn't have it any other way.

Stuff like this makes biz travel easier, as I don't have to compromise between
bringing my work laptop or my more 'comfortable' personal laptop, since
they're one and the same.

Yes, there's always the possibility of a fuss when you leave the company; they
want to make sure you've deleted all their data from your machine, but in
practice this hasn't been an issue for me (yet).

------
mtogo
Wow, TIL dual 2GHz, 4GB RAM and 160GB of storage is "reasonably spec-ed". I
use half that and i love it, i don't even know what i'd do with more.

~~~
humbledrone
I'm guessing that you don't work on a large compiled application. :)

When you're working with millions lines of C, the speed of the compile
decreases (nearly) linearly with the number of cores. Having gobs of memory
speeds things up, too, because large portions of your filesystem will be
cached in RAM all the time. Throw in a couple of VMs that you use for
different build environments and you can easily suck up 4 gigs of RAM.

