As a 35 year old waiter with no formal education, who has also spent the majority of his free time the last 25 years either coding or self-studying to further my coding, I am super interested in your life story. While struggling to scrape by has been "awesome", I'm hoping to one day succeed at making tech my livelihood. Do you have a blog or something? lol

But to go back to the topic: are companies that have such a high level of OpSec actually outfitting devs with garbage, enterprise lease, mid-to-low tier laptops? I only have knowledge from a few friends' experiences, but even guys doing relatively non-hardware intensive workloads are given a Dell XPS or MacBook Pro. I would imagine a fintech would know better AND have the funds to allocate for either of those options

Maybe an in-house SWE at a major bank would end up with that level of OpSec on a mediocre fleet laptop, although I'd hope they'd have managers willing to go to bat for them and an IT department that can accommodate provisioning multiple SKUs depending on an employee's actual computational needs.... perhaps I too have a skewed/naive sense of how the corporate computing world works haha