Should Employees Buy Their Own Computers?

LonerVamp said:
Even so, there is still corporate interest in what data someone actually has on their hard drive...when said hard drive goes missing or someone quits, yes?
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I don't remember anything specific about that, personal property is certainly never inspected. The thing is that you sign a NDA at the start of your employment, even external vendors have to, so you're trusted to act responsibly. And there's absolutely nothing different between accessing corporate data from your home or your office computer: People who really want to could copy their corporate emails, whole shares of corporate applications or repositories of corporate data to USB devices on their workstations or external hard drives. The fact that they don't do it and that there are virtually no leak from employees or vendors show that this trust responsible relationship works.

It always makes me laugh when people speak of Microsoft as the next Big Brother. Sure, there could be some questionable decisions from time to time in such a big company, and there has been a few bad ones in MS earlier history, but internal employees are just as quick or quicker to pick up on that. Hell, the "diversity" social groups have even forced Microsoft to withdraw support to some politicians who didn't fit in with the corporate anti-discrimation policy! ^-^
 
I have been buying my own computers for company use for about 5 years now... It sucks but I get something that I want and get to keep it when I leave (which has happened twice now).
 
If a company doesn't want to pay for the extra productivity a faster workstation allows for, then clearly that company:

1. Doesn't ighly value the output of that employee
2. Doesn't understand the role of that employee and the output they produce
3. Is in a financially unstable position

If you still have a P3 based workstation at work, which category do you fall into? Also- if you have stock options/grants, then you're no longer working for "the man"- you are part owner, so the success of the company directly equates to your own personal success. If however you have zero stake in the company with the exception of a paycheck- why the hell would you want to provide your own gear?
 
Yes. Because I don't trust coworkers. *cough*

Not that I necessarily think they would put an information stealing trojan in it (which is a high possiblity in a large corporate setting)

But I think that they would probably do a pretty crappy job of putting in physically together.

If I was an employer though, I would prefer to have control over the computers, just in case of a rogue employee.
 
TheWeazmeister said:
Yeah....No ty from an IT standpoint. People are dumb enough on locked down systems, let alone their own systems that they have no clue how to secure.

OE to the nth degree.
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I totally understand your side of the story. I've seen some boneheaded moves from some people. I got so bad that the company will not let anyone install hardware/software anymore. A nuisance for me but "it is what it is".
 
as locked down as my work pc is (I can't even install flash or upgrade IE), no I would not want them to have that much control on my personal property.
 
Chimel said:
I don't remember anything specific about that, personal property is certainly never inspected. The thing is that you sign a NDA at the start of your employment, even external vendors have to, so you're trusted to act responsibly. And there's absolutely nothing different between accessing corporate data from your home or your office computer: People who really want to could copy their corporate emails, whole shares of corporate applications or repositories of corporate data to USB devices on their workstations or external hard drives. The fact that they don't do it and that there are virtually no leak from employees or vendors show that this trust responsible relationship works.

It always makes me laugh when people speak of Microsoft as the next Big Brother. Sure, there could be some questionable decisions from time to time in such a big company, and there has been a few bad ones in MS earlier history, but internal employees are just as quick or quicker to pick up on that. Hell, the "diversity" social groups have even forced Microsoft to withdraw support to some politicians who didn't fit in with the corporate anti-discrimation policy! ^-^
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^This post here.

When you work in organizations with 100-200 thousand people in them, it has to run off the trust responsible relationship as a big brother, 1980's IBM style of management does not work, especially now-a-days. Too many people with too many ways to access and take information to micromanage. Also, employees today have more power in these big corps than they did 20-30 years ago.

It also makes me chuckle hearing about how evil some of these corps are, especially the one I work for, because the reality inside the org is far from the general public opinion.

Hell, if I said who I worked for and how great of a company it is to work for, I'd get a bunch of people scoffing and calling me brainwashed ;) But they have no f-ing clue, just a misguided perception.
 
I know alot of companies that allow you to bring in your own LCD including mine, which is pretty sweets. However, from the CPU perspective, being IT, I would hate if employees brought in there own laptops or PC's for everyday job work.
 
Lazy_Moron said:
I know alot of companies that allow you to bring in your own LCD including mine, which is pretty sweets. However, from the CPU perspective, being IT, I would hate if employees brought in there own laptops or PC's for everyday job work.
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Policy ought to be something along the lines of,

"You buy it, you's supporting it. Not us."
 
Satyrist said:
Policy ought to be something along the lines of,

"You buy it, you's supporting it. Not us."
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The problem with that is productivity goes down because the responsibility of system uptime falls now on the user and not on the IT dept/help desk.

A few places this might not be an issue as the userbase can be quite tech savvy, but most places, you're asking quite a lot out of people, which in the end will bite the company in the ass.
 
No No No!

Most employee's are dolts, think of all the people that work and how many don't know crap about computers.

If you have the same hardware/software/anti virus/ etc. it is much much easier to maintain.
 
Any IT person with a basic clue of what is oiur there could far better build a desktop for any user in the company, period.

Problem is when upper management says "we need 100 computers for $20k..." and then you get stuck with crappy OEM slow systems.
 
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