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Comment by wikibob | Hacker News Reader

A better question is why do you feel the need to “stay on top of slack” during your non work hours?

Having entirely separate devices is BY FAR the best thing I have done for my mental health and productivity. Same as other posters here.

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I love my job and I love my life and I deliberately blend them together. This makes me substantially more productive as an employee, and incalculably happier as a human being.

If I want to see a friend in the middle of the day, I do it. If I want to take a 3 hour lunch, I do it. When someone 8 time zones away answers a question I asked earlier at my 1AM, and I’m awake and see it, I’m excited to learn the new whatever thing, and may take an hour (or three!) to chat with them about it.

Everything I do in life I have opted into and enjoy. I gain nothing by firewalling some parts of it from other parts.

I have tried every modality of managing work and personal life and this one is by far —- by far —- the best one for me. The notion that there is a work laptop and a personal laptop and naer the twain shall meet is a complete anachronism. It’s fine if that separation helps other people but it actively hurts me.

For some odd reason, I instantly thought of Foucault's idea of biopower[1][2] after reading your comment as a possible counterpoint, despite not being well-versed in the subject.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biopower [2]: https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/8237/8/Review%20article%20-%20...

That’s fun! Yeah, I buy it, but to the extent it works as a counterargument I’d say it’s actually more of an inevitability.

> The notion that there is a work laptop and a personal laptop and naer the twain shall meet is a complete anachronism. It’s fine if that separation helps other people but it actively hurts me.

Wow.. All I can suggest is think through the consequences. Unless you work for yourself or a very tiny startup, your employer is monitoring everything you do and store on the work computer.

You may also get cut off at any moment with zero notice if there are layoffs. If you had any personal content there, you've lost it.

Also, depending on where you live, but it can also mean now the company has a strong ownership claim to anything and everything you do in side projects since it is being done on company equipment.

I work for a large company, I have a desktop machine, I fail to see how the company would have access to it (assuming they aren’t using any zero day exploits etc to attack it). They don’t have my private ssh key so can’t ssh in, it sits on my desk at home so they have no physical access. It came straight from the factory and I installed vanilla Ubuntu on it.

Not your case, obviously, but there is a plethora of management software (like Workspace One) that is mandated in some companies.

> It came straight from the factory and I installed vanilla Ubuntu on it.

In that case hopefully not but as seen elsewhere in this thread, for other OSs they can fully own it even if shipped factory direct.

Unless manufacturers are putting these spyware hooks directly into the firmware? Haven't heard of that yet, but those things change.

This is such a hilariously American post. I realize most of this forum is American, but still. :-)

I know, right ;)

And it's not really representative of the US. I work for anything but a tiny startup on a personal MacBook and no one is monitoring everything I do.

> on a personal MacBook and no one is monitoring everything I do

Well you said personal MacBook, this topic is about work laptop or phone.

These days (sadly) for any non-small company, all work computers and phones have remote control spyware. If you think that's not the case in your large company, you're probably wrong.

At a recent medium size engineering company, I was constantly surprised how even extremely technical engineers in the company didn't realize all the company spyware that is running on their laptop.

The standard Linux laptops people are given are fully company-managed. But many people, including myself, reload them with a distribution we manage ourselves.

I do have MDM on my personal iPhone but that seemed like a reasonable tradeoff in order to easily access work email and files on my phone.

Having a work phone that you cannot be reached on outside of standard work hours kind of defeats the purpose right? At least that is the sole reason I can think of that I would need a work phone in the first place.

The purpose of a work phone is to carry it during the specifically agreed upon period that you are actively on-call.

And you should be compensated specifically for that on call time. A standard is 1/3 of your on call time out of business hours is credited as PTO hours for 30 minute response.

Or 2/3 of your on call time out of business hours is credited as PTO hours for 5 minute response.

Why else would an employer want you to use slack on a phone? "On-Call" devops rotation or something like that?

Same rules apply even in that case. If you can't txt/page/slack me on my personal phone, then you don't get me "on-call". I'm _not_ going to carry two phones for anyone ever again (been there, done that, hated it).

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