A nice side effect of that was I could clearly control when the phone won't even be on me and I had set that expectation - like treks, or short personal vacations, sleeping hours (yes!). I had championed the "follow the sun" policy in my company when it came to on-call rotation, but somehow some of my fellow country men/women colleagues took pride in "being available". Anyway, their time, their choice.
Later some of my colleagues were surprised when they couldn't install certain apps, couldn't do certain things and often used to wonder "does the company take screenshots of my phone?" because the permission was present :D
I call that being exploitable.
Marxian style LTV analysis of the economy breaks down hardcore involving anything touching electrons. His analysis of the theory of alienation/exploitation is literally invalid in the era of computers, and exponentially so in the era of AI systems. It's not "exploitation" to be available in exchange for comically large amounts of money.
I wasn't reachable by phone for company related stuff outside my regular working hours unless I had on-call-duty, which means it was working hours.
I don't get why people would be proud about not setting boundaries.
For the record, this was never at night. Late in the evening, sure.
So it can actually make logical sense to do it occasionally even from a purely selfish perspective if it's half an hour on a random Tuesday evening and you aren't actually doing anything else important.
All depends if the company is actually going to be grateful or not though
Not sure if upper management sees this stuff. For the number of times I've fixed other people's crap (or found the root cause, so they can just fix it) I don't think I got any recognition for that.
It’s as if they had two choices:
“we’ll provide clothes but you can bring your own lunch!”; vs
“wear your own clothes and we’ll provide lunch!”
and they chose the weird one not the helpful one.
I am extremely picky about keyboards, screens, and OS configuration as a result of being partially deaf, having poor eyesight, and honestly being a bit of an old stick in the mud. It would be lovely to set aside some space on an old Thinkpad for work tasks. It would be comfortable and easy to isolate and be just like my personal machine.
Instead I get a choice between a MacBook with a fixed alternate key layout or a Windows machine with a locked down bright white wallpaper and a non admin account.
Cheat code for this: ask them if they need any custom tooling. I spent a few hours at a past job on a userscript for their ticketing interface to fix some annoyances. Brownie points for life.
But, I believe I'm in the minority. Most of my fellow employees have added corp to their phone. I believe most do personal stuff on their work computer. I get it, it's inconvenient. I've gone to offsites and given don't have corp on my phone I have to pull out my corp laptop to contact people and/or lookup stuff that they wouldn't. It would also be much nicer to set personal appointments or deal with personal things I need to during business hours on a laptop than my phone. On rare occasions I bring my laptop to work if I know I'm going to need access to my stuff even though all of it is in the cloud so theoretically I could access it from a work laptop.
I was once at an SV party and several Apple employees (3 women, 5 gay men, 3 straight men) said they all used their work laptops to watch porn at home or traveling. I was pretty shocked. Not that they watched but that they used work laptops for it. They all thought it was fine. It came up because, for some reason I mentioned I always take 2 laptops on business trips, my personal one and my work one. They said they never do that, they just take their work one and do personal stuff. I asked, what about porn and they all said they watched on work laptops.
That was a very long way to say I think people like myself who separate the two are rare.
I love that you went there directly, that’s hilarious. I would have wondered the same (wouldn’t we all?), but been embarrassed to ask.
This is a wise choice. For me, nothing personal goes onto my work phone or laptop. And nothing work-related goes onto personal devices. Life is just easier that way.
At some point, I couldn’t live with myself, and purchased my own computer (better than what work gave me, anyway).
I never used my personal cell for work. The closest thing was coordinating meetups, when traveling.
If you are worried about the company claiming rights over your personal work, then it is prudent.
2) That’s definitely a valid point. I have worked on free/open-source code for most of my adult life. For a long time, it was for my own use, but I started publishing code for use by others, and provenance became a much more important coefficient.
Honestly, of the two scenarios, this one is the more likely to fall on the employee's side.
We haven't really tested the legal precedent for ownership of LLM outputs very thoroughly yet, and I'm willing to bet a bunch of us still have employment contracts that haven't been updated to cover LLM use...
It might be overly paranoid depending on what the circumstances are, it might be a real concern as well.
Then I realized how stupid that was even though my employer was fine with and was never strict with how a work laptop is used.
I realized not only did I not want my work to know what I'm doing on my personal time, the risk of cross-contamination and being accused of stealing confidential documents or a personal text making it look like I'm doing something wrong is too high.
I bought my own cell phone and laptop and now never use my work equipment for anything but work. Not worth the risk.
If they wrongfully accuse you of that, isn't it a place you should leave in any case?
When she stopped working for them, they informed her, that the number legally belonged to them.
It was not a problem for her, because she wanted to get rid of the number anyway, else too many old clients would call.
But it was an interesting situation nonetheless.