Do you bring your work laptop home with you at the end of the day?
I would like to know how the rest of the community works. At my previous position, the laptop were locked to the desk. You had the key, but it was a bit of a bother to unlock and bring it home with you. If you needed to log in, there was a VPN for that. My current office has a lot more flexibility, and it seems like it is the habit of most everyone to bring their laptops with them. I actually feel weird the few times I have left it in office. I have started bringing it home with me more often then not, but really don't use it.
What's the culture at your workplace?
Top comments (55)
My company allows us to use their laptops as we see fit. I have complete freedom to take it home with me. I absolutely never do because I make it a point to separate work from the rest of my life. When I leave the office, I am done working. I don't take work home with me.
This. I have too many workaholic tendencies to bring work home.
Self care is the best care. Sometimes knowing you need that extra step of leaving it at home makes a huge difference. Thanks for sharing!
I agree, I try my best to separate work from home life, it feels like a slippery slop when you always have your work available to you.
Meh... Working from home, frequently, means that most pay-periods, I've burned all my period's hours by about Wednesday of the second week ...leaving me the option of either taking that Thursday and/or Friday off or pulling a few extra hours to offset the next Uber and bar-tab for a night out with my wife. When I work from the office, I'm much more 8hr/day aligned ...but mostly because if I don't, my commute becomes a five minutes per mile crawl.
There's pluses and minuses to having your work at home.
I leave my laptop at work unless I am planning on working from home over the coming days. All of the office doors have security card scanners, and my team is pretty small anyway, so there aren't very many people milling around. I'd say if it is cause for your concern, then put your mind at ease and do what makes you comfortable - if that means bringing it home every day, then that's ok!
I take mine home with me every day. I don't often work from home or after "working" hours. But since I'm responsible for several apps in production, it's easier to deal with any after-hours issues since the work laptop has everything I would need. And if something comes up at the last minute requiring me to work from home, it gives me the option to do so. I work in a pretty small shop too - only 5 developers at the moment.
I leave it unless there's something I was planning on doing like wfh the next day or work a tad over the weekend.
It's weird for me individually since I walk, though, so either I have a much heavier backpack or I'm carrying a laptop through the city. So I try not to do it much :P
It's a big company, so there's a mix of people who always take it home in case they get sick overnight and want to wfh and people who will never ever take it home. And the people who take it home to do all their code reviews and such at midnight since they think 9-5 has to be "real" coding work.
That feels like a discussion topic all on its own, whether or not code reviews are "real" coding work.
Yeah, I have my issues with those types :)
It seems the more senior people on my team have issues adjusting to the changing job descriptions as they level up, so they want to engineer for 8 hours, not do reviews or interviews or scrum meetings and then code for 2 or whatever is left. So they get burnt out doing the non-directly-engineering work and 8 hours of coding on top and quality suffers.
I could see that happening with burning out on a schedule like that. When I was tech leading team, I had zero time for actual coding tasks. Just scrum, meetings, code review, mentoring and planning. Definitely not how I wanted to spend my day all day, every day.
I leave it in the office. The only case I'll bring it to home is when I'm planning to work from home.
Also our laptops are not locked at office too.
Both of my jobs gave me a laptop so I currently have three (including my personal one) in total ¯_(ツ)_/¯
It's a fine line. I always leave each individual laptop at the workplace. I'm not really working after office hours and that's not really expected from both of my employers. It's also for my own sanity, to keep me from mixing working hours.
They do want me reachable so I keep most communication stuff on my personal laptop. If there are urgent matters I can still send files or respond.
Hopefully they are all the same OS! That would get confusing.
Yea! All of them are MacBooks 💻
My company keeps a very small engineering team, so we're all somewhat hybrid devs/sysadmins.
Unless we're doing a major "This is going to incur downtime so we're doing it overnight" deployment, my laptop stays at the office.
I have an SSH client on my iPhone in case I need to fix something on one of our production machines in an emergency, but that's it.
That's pretty badass to be able to fix a production issue on your phone!
This app is a lifesaver.
We use the Cloud for almost everything. So with a VPN connection and few settings at my Personal Laptop (like installing the Database that we use, and install the IDE that we use at work), download the working branch (that you need to do anyways) I can pretty much Work at Home without taking my work computer.
Let's be honest I never know when it will be the day I wake up and I am the Lotto Winner or I find a Billion dollars under the mattress and decide not to go back to the office and resign via Facebook ;)
Really work items belong to the work environment.
No, I do not bring my laptop with me.
When I was an intern in another company I had to, because it was just a startup with no funds (at the time) to spend to many computers.
But the company I work for now is able to supply us with all the equipment we need. :)
At my last job I would leave my laptop at work almost always and we didn't even have locks. At my current company, the laptops are locked to the desk but it is against policy to leave the laptop behind after hours.
I bring my laptop home cause you never know, maybe tomorrow something will happen (like traffic related stuff or something else), that forces me to stay home. But also because I don't have a laptop, and sometimes I use the company's for Netflix or YouTube.
Well, I was working remote for the last 2 years. Now that's I've been in the office for 2.5 months, I have been leaving my laptop at work. Primarily due to contract reasons, I'm not allowed to work at any other location but the office between Monday and Friday.
So that severely limits me, but I have found it freeing as well. Though I still have work email and Slack on my phone so....
That is one thing I am avoiding, putting Slack on my phone. That seems like something that would really impact my work/life balance. My work's slack is a super time suck for me sometimes.
It's expected that we bring them home as we have customers in different time zones. Thankfully nothing has happened where I had to work at home in the evenings... yet.
Also, it's way more powerful than my laptop, and they're happy to let us use them for personal use. I make sure to close down all work-related apps (slack, email) before heading home so I don't have to see them if I use the laptop later on.
So I'm a weirdo and I hate laptops for normal work. At my last 2 jobs, I use a personal desktop at home and company-provided one at work.
When I did have a laptop for work, I basically set it up like a desktop and left it at work, except for an occasional work trip. However, my co-workers would generally take them home every day.
I'm a fan of desktops too, that is my preferred at home device.
During the week I will take it home with me. If I think I will not be at work the next day for any reason, I'll take it with me; and that includes weekends. If I have more work to do outside of working hours, I'll take it with me etc.