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?
Latest comments (55)
My laptop stays at work, and so does work.
We have the option of bringing work home or leaving it at work. Pretty much the freedom is up to you. However, not carrying the work home free's up your mind to do anything work related like snowboard :)
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.
haha I take my work laptop everywhere even though it's probably not a good thing to do when it comes to work/life balance. Everyone else seems to leave theirs at the studio though.
I work for a financial institution and we're expected to take them home. That way, in the event of a natural disaster or extended power outage or whatnot, we're still able to work if needed.
I code for the core financial system (staff facing and back end processes, as opposed to member facing programs such as online banking). We don't have an on call rotation, but it's still been useful the times where I've got called after hours or on weekends to do some troubleshooting.
I know some people at my company take their work laptop home, most of them use it for their regular Internet stuff at home since my team can't work from home at all (we need to be connected directly to the LAN for repo and external service access - client's request). I have a personal MacBook Pro at home and therefore have no need to take my work laptop there to use it as a personal laptop.
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.
Unless I'm working remotely, my laptop stays at work. Both due to avoid a workaholic mindset and because my work laptop is old, clunky, and annoying at times.
We have a "do as you need" mentality at my workplace, although it is implied that you will have your laptop at home just in case something happens. Often I see others who are very focused on tasks, and they can be found online at all hours. I at times feel like I have a solution to something that has bothered me, or I suddenly feel like I can tackle some task that has been on my todo list and having my laptop at home allows me to just scratch that itch and complete one more task. Overall security is the main reason I, and my company, encourages people to bring them home. Laptops are small, easily seen and put into a bag, so even a small lapse in security (and I have seen them) can result in many laptops suddenly missing in a short time.
We do weekly live sites. A pair of back-end and front-end developers have to be available at a 15 minutes notice throughout the week. So, when it's my turn I prefer to take my laptop with home (event though I have the project setup on my personal machine as well, just in case Windows decide to push an update and kill my machine all together! 🙄). But most of the time, I prefer to keep my work laptop at work!
Just gives me a bit of peace of mind that I don't have to take care of another machine 😶
Our company doesn't provide us any computers so we bring our own :(
Benefit of BYOD is that it greatly limits the amount of snooping an employer can engage in. Plus, you never have to fight with your company's desktop support staff over "why can't I have admin on my system" or "why won't you whitelist this application", etc. Lastly, personal hardware refresh cycles are often much quicker than "accountant approved" refresh cycles ...and when you do buy, you can get exactly the type of system you want and customize it to your hearts content.
the problem is it takes 4 months + doing lots gigs just to buy a laptop of my own, the salary is low and company doesn't have much support :(
I started a new job recently so can talk about both my current employer and the previous one.
At my previous employer it was company policy to take the laptop home with you, this was because there was a moderate earthquake a couple of years ago and then a storm a week later which prevented a lot of staff making it in to the office on those days, and therefore working. So the policy of taking the laptop home was based on business continuity and productivity.
At my current employer things are a bit more relaxed, most do take the laptop home at the end of the day but its not mandatory. I don't take it home during the week mostly because its so damn HEAVY in the backpack. I know however I will get caught out one day - there will be some unexpected problem affecting the trains and I will not be able to get in to work - guess I will have to use up some annual leave on that day :)
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.
I take mine home every day. In the case I have to remote in only my work laptop is allowed to do it.
Hmm dont get too attached.know where personal life and work meet by the clock