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christine
christine

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Does your laptop stay at work?

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?

Oldest comments (55)

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webbydevvy profile image
Charlie Strack

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!

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Evaldas Buinauskas

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.

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Kasey Speakman

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.

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cseeman profile image
christine

I'm a fan of desktops too, that is my preferred at home device.

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Matheus Candido

In my case we leave the laptop at work but are free to bring them home as well for whatever needs.

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Ross Henderson

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.

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Marlysson Silva

In my first office place I did work using company's PC .. Then I did leaving it in office..
Now I work using own laptop, them I bring them with me in work and home...

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avalander profile image
Avalander • Edited

By own laptop you mean that you bought it instead of the company providing it?

How does that arrangement work with your company? I'd never consider using my own equipment instead of the company's for work (in normal conditions, when all servers are down at 3am and you need to fix it, you use whatever is handy), but I've always assumed that employers would be equally reluctant to having their employees bring and use their own equipment to work.

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rhymes

I worked for a couple of startups in the past and both had all us devs use our own computers, it was a "given". I remember the tech lead in one of them lobbying with the founder to buy SSDs for the people who lacked one so we could work better :D

It's a wild wild world out there.

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marlysson profile image
Marlysson Silva

Year ... I bought my own laptop to use at work..

Whole code of applications inside it..

There aren't any arrangement work related to this.. Just to using to solve problems of applications

It's a small company too.. Then there are no many problems with "employee catch the source code's applications" ... Confidence too counts..

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cseeman profile image
christine

We used to use some development contractors in a bring-your-own-laptop type contract. Used an internet accessible GitLab, with emulators for all internal systems. I think it depends on the company, I think know some companies are more willing to give more flexibility especially when most of your systems might be cloud based, and then it is cheap and quicker to ramp up a new contractor.

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Giuseppe Turitto

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.

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shubhambattoo profile image
Shubham Battoo

It depends mostly, like you can take it home and continue. Or you can keep it at the designated desks where they are locked. Flexible.

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Paul Isaris

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. :)

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Drew Knab • Edited

First job, it always came home with me.

Second job, I almost never brought it home. I just used my personal machine when I had to work from home. It was all php-direct-server-access-via-ssh-github-pull-to-deploy, so the machine was 0% important. Once we figured out vagrant and made a company image, we could work on pretty much anything anywhere.

Third job, no laptop. Got a big ol' honkin' PC that's always on that I can RDP to.

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Reese Poirier

I'm on an on-call rotation, so I make a habit of bringing my laptop home every day so I can't forget to during on-call weeks. I also like having it at home with me in case I'm unexpectedly not able to come in to the office, but may still be able to work from home for at least part of the day.

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cseeman profile image
christine

It is nice to have that flexibility, that really is the best reason for bringing your laptop home with you.

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rapidnerd profile image
George

Most of the time I work from home, but in the case of working in a office my laptop comes with me everywhere and I use that as my main work station instead of their computers (Most don't have an issue with it). If it's work assigned some employers may ask to leave it on site for various reasons, but others don't mind. My father works both in an office and from home, they don't mind him taking his laptop out of work to get stuff done from home.

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Chad Windham

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.

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cseeman profile image
christine

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.

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Thomas H Jones II

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.

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Andrew Cato

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.

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Kim Arnett 

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!

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ItsASine (Kayla)

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.

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cseeman profile image
christine

That feels like a discussion topic all on its own, whether or not code reviews are "real" coding work.

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ItsASine (Kayla)

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.

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cseeman profile image
christine

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.

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Stargator

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....

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cseeman profile image
christine

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.