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Comment by easton | Hacker News Reader

Curious, why wouldn't you rather them buy you (or issue you) a work laptop and you get a personal laptop? Just don't use work hardware for not work things. (Unless you don't make enough to buy a personal laptop I guess, but of the jobs where they issue you hardware I bet they probably pay you enough to buy your own.)

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My work overlaps so much that it would simply be a hassle to have two different machines. A lot of problems I solve on my own end up being used in our code base, and vice-versa. But I also work at a small company (less than 90 people), so we're more nimble than other companies I imagine.

A kvm isn’t too difficult to set up and could give you the protection of separating the hardware for your personal and work life

Especially if you do a lot of travel, having to consciously partition what you use your devices for is just inconvenient. Circumstances differ of course. But I've never had an issue intermixing personal and work use.

I’ve seen people sharing their screens when private text messages pop up.

Sure, if you’re careful enough with notifications that shouldn’t happen, but I’d much rather take a personal iPad with me on travel and never risk it.

Travels a good one. Also, it's nice to be able to use personal devices for work stuff. Say you want to read a doc on your iPad or respond to an email on your phone. I totally understand the security perspective though.

Totally depends on circumstance. Senior government officials should almost certainly maintain clear separation. Highly regulated industries that are logging everything as in the current example. But a dogmatic position that no employee should ever intermix personal and work presences just isn't universally the case.

What happens if you try to start a side business? Any work you do with your work laptop has questionable copyright.

What happens if your company realizes they need to track leaks of their data for compliance? Do they need to force you to install software that looks at every file you download on your personal machine?

Separate machines is better for both the employee and employer.

Personally I struggle with the blurring of work and personal time so allowing myself up access personal social media, news, study materials makes it harder to say for sure when I've given my employer the amount of hours owed and can go do something else.

A lot of people don't have this issue, but I can't be the only one that does. I find strictly compartmentalising everything the only way to go.

Absolutely. If having hard boundaries work for you, that's totally what you should do.

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