Their current job, presumably
It would never occur to me to use an employer's hardware for such a purpose. It seems absurdly lazy, but I know that not everyone's life works like mine, so I would like to understand why this would be a real problem for people.
That's a very uncommon mindset and worldview.
For 99% of people, the default would be "I'm going to join this Zoom meeting from the laptop I use all day long to join Zoom meetings, and I'm going to code using the laptop I use all day long to code".
Lots of people have their work tools setup on their work computer, but not on their personal computer. Their personal laptop might be relatively underpowered and struggle to run all the required software efficiently during an interview. The issue becomes even more significant as more of the tools used require an account - you don't want your interview performance to suffer because you're using an unfamiliar tool or service, so you just use the ones you're used to using every day.
Sharing other's company secrets by mistake, using other company's resources in ways that are definitely forbidden - is this a person you really want to hire since they will behave the same in your company? Is this a person you want to give trust with some internals?
In market with 100s or applicants thats enough to disqualify anybody who actually needs an interview or two to get hired.
I've been in management for the past decade and interviewed a few hundred candidates in that time. Never once did I ask or care who owned the laptop they were using.
And similarly, if someone on my team used their work laptop for an interview, I wouldn't care at all.
> Lots of people have their work tools setup on their work computer, but not on their personal computer...you don't want your interview performance to suffer because you're using an unfamiliar tool or service...
I struggle to come up of even the most absurd interview scenario where the tool makes the difference especially in our field where if a FOSS tool is not standard, then there's a sufficiently powerful free tier (eg., Sublime, IntelliJ). Heck most remote interviews, they take you out of your tools completely and ask you to code on some shared browser-based editor.
> That's a very uncommon mindset and worldview.
I'm calling HN SV start-up bias. Outside of the startup software eng'g industry, a lot of people exercise very good separation between work tools and personal tools. I know a lawyer, _who's the head of his own law firm,_ bring his personal laptop to the office just so he could purchase tickets during office hours.
I think this is also down to a few factors:
- SWEs are typically issued high-end machines in contrast to other professions whose standard issue is still 4GB (or 8GB, if you're lucky) RAM. For those professions buying a better personal laptop is a low bar to clear.
- SWEs are more efficient when they have admin access to their own machines. Though it begs the question that maybe some inefficiency would've been an acceptable tradeoff to $6.3B.
- SWE is one of the professions on the poster for the "Get paid good while working from Bali" lifestyle, wherein BYOD is implied, especially if you are freelancing.
I had an interview recently where I'd initially planned to use my own machine, then gave up and just used my work computer.
I'm used to the whiteboarding/UML/flowchart software I use at work, so I either needed to pay for a personal subscription so I could use it in the interview or be forced to use some other software I'm not familiar with. I also didn't have a personal paid AI code tool, so again either pay for a personal one or just use the work Claude account. Also the webcam on my work laptop is substantially nicer than my personal laptop.
Also, critically, it doesn't matter. If IT or my manager had pinged me to ask "Did you do an interview at noon yesterday?" I would have said yes and then the only follow-up would have been them asking if it was a random thing or if I was actively looking.
I think IT (and I guess, lawyers) are probably the only people who care much about separating work and personal devices, just because they're prone to being aware of how much surveillance of the device can be happening. People in marketing/sales/whatever back office stuff will be logged into their personal Facebook, Netflix, iMessages, Email and bank and never consider that their keystrokes are being logged and screenshots are being taken.
IT is aware of surveillance. Lawyers have a legal responsibility to take all reasonable steps to safeguard confidential client information. A lawyer misusing a work device is probably roughly equivalent to a healthcare worker doing the same.
Also, some people might not have dev environments set up on their personal devices. Heck, a lot of people only use the internet through their smartphone, when they're not at work.