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 positi...
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is nice to have that flexibility, that really is the best reason for bringing your laptop home with you.
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.
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 :)
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.
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 :)
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...
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.
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.
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..
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.
Hmm dont get too attached.know where personal life and work meet by the clock
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 :(
In my case we leave the laptop at work but are free to bring them home as well for whatever needs.
I take mine home every day. In the case I have to remote in only my work laptop is allowed to do it.
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 😶
I work on my own laptop, hence it is always with me 😊
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 from my couch, so, "yeah". =)
My laptop stays at work, and so does work.
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.
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.