As someone who no longer shares devices / numbers / ... with employers partly due to NDA shenanigans in the same vein as in this article and when I left that company they tried to make my life as difficult as possible and tried to withhold compensation and so on.

Sure, in the happy path porting number is easy. But this assumes that

* the company will be ok with you porting it out (and not just hold onto it out of spite, which I believe the company I worked for might have done)

* the company will handle that kind of tickets in a reasonable amount of time

* the company will not need to escalate this sort of request to levels where they will then be ignored

* the company will be technically competent to handle this sort of request

I'm not saying that all or even most companies will have these problems but the issue is that if the first thing you do when joining the company is port your number over, how can you know what the internal company culture is and if they will make it feasible for you to get your number back later on?

This also ignores the big selling point of keeping your work accounts / numbers separate: being able to disconnect. Just being able to put your work laptop and phone away and know that you won't get called has it's own fairly large value.

Also:

* If your employer is bought out, the HR org could change overnight without warning. This happened to me.

Oh yeah for sure lol. Don't know how I could miss that since one part of the NDA shenanigans with the particular company I was talking about was that another company bought it during the same period that I started there and a lot of things changed essentially overnight (at least according to colleagues who had worked there for a long time).

The full story is ridiculous / hilarious:

The acquisition meant that between the period that I got the official contract (which was supposed to be the new parent companies contract but their HR department refused to send it out to the then daughter company, so I ended up with the old default contract for the daughter company) and signed the contract, and when I started working (which was a couple of months due to reasons) they had an updated "NDA" which actually was a new employment contract with a lot more terms than were in the original contract (and that were illegal in my country, at least according to my legal counsel).

So my first day at that place a new "NDA" waited for me on my desk which turned out to actually be an employment contract. And apart from it having illegal provisions in it, there were references to me accepting an NDA rider that was not available to me at that point so I asked for a copy of that.

In the actual NDA there were even worse provisions. One clause in the contract expanded (it wasn't explicit but that was what it meant) to me not being able to get a mortgage (or even a bank account) in my country (because I would not be allowed to do any kind of "business" with any company who was a customer of my company, or that was a customer of our customer due to them using our software (and we provided FX software for banks).

Another clause explicitly said that all intellectual property that I produced from the time that I signed the NDA were properties of the company, and they would own all intellectual property that I produced UNTIL THE DAY I DIED (including after leaving the company), so after leaving that company I would not be able to work at any place that would expect me to provide intellectual property for them (unless I fought that admittedly illegal agreement in court).

Obviously I refused to sign the new contract and sent an email to the daughter company CEO (we were less than 40 employees) asking to set up a meeting. I then never got a reply until ~6 months later when I was threatening to leave (partly because of this, partly because of payment disagreements, partly because ~25 employees of the daughter company had resigned and left from when I started to that point). Then he really apologized and admitted in a private meeting that no, the employment contract was not enforceable in our country and that even presenting it to employees as something that they might be asked to sign would be grounds for sanctions for the company. And then he managed to convince the parent company to get me a counter offer to get me to not leave which was super insulting (~50USD/month raise), combined with trying to get me to take over as head of operations for the daughter company (because, apart from me and one other person the whole ops department there had resigned).

So obviously I left. And after I resigned the parent company refused to pay out overtime because "there is no explicit agreement with the /new/ company about overtime compensation", and they did some other things to try to screw me over.

There are also some hilarious stories about the guy who stayed and what they promised and how they "fulfilled" those commitments. But that's not my story to tell.

Anyway sorry for ranting, apparently I still have some sore spots regarding this company lol.

And tl;dr: just because your company might be cool right now and you trust it, it might get bought up tomorrow and everything changes overnight.

edit: I got around the "requirement" for me to sign the new contract / nda by getting an email from the local HR asking for me to send in the NDA and me responding with a PDF of the signed origal contract and an email saying "here is the contract that I have signed", and then it freaked out the parent companies HR person during the exit interview when they looked me up in the system (because they had a history of making a point of saying that their intention was to enforce the NDA + employment contract as harshly as possible) and I then told her to check the related PDF.

I have nothing to say about companies in general. I only spoke about that particular company Rachel and I both worked at. My experience was smooth.

Sure. My point was more "how would you know the experience would have been smooth" before you worked there for a while?

edit: sure, her description of the hurdles etc might not be representative of things at that specific company, to be clear.

Just saying that it's a risk to connect your personal stuff to any company.

This one aspect aside (porting out barriers/risks/complexities) do you disagree with the advice to separate personal and work accounts and devices? I don't. I've disburdened my personal apple ID and made a work one about 3 years ago, and separated my Google identity precisely so that I don't face these risks. (Google can be ferocious about closing off access to your life, if they deem e.g. you abused advertising norms and t&c, and my company had some risk of this)

BTW you replied in about 5 places to re state your experience of this porting thing. That read as slightly obsessively detailed and specific hence my question because not once have you stated a view about the rest of her piece, except mildly disparagingly.

Yes I actually disagree with the advice. This might seem crazy, but maybe I’ll just prefer to work for people who aren’t complete psychopaths. Like the company that apparently assigned all IP till the day the employee died.

It’s a point of view. Certainly there are people who feel that every interaction with their employer needs to be contentious. I prefer to trust and assume good intent. Will I be disappointed on occasion? Definitely. I’m ok with that.

I didn’t reply in 5 places. I replied once and then sent a similar response to 3 people who said pretty much the same thing. I can’t help it if they don’t read the other responses and rush to comment identical things.

> * I replied once and then sent a similar response to 3 people*

So.. you rebutted the same point 4 times, which is about 5...

I responded to your comment in good faith, giving you a different perspective from the dominant one here.

Instead of responding to that you’re going “haha I was right!!!”

Good for you I guess?

No, bad for me. You added one point, four times, your one point has substance: you actually worked for the same company, and did do the phone transfer, and it was hassle free. And, you answered my direct question we just disagree about the substantive motivations to separate work and personal devices. I agree with the original poster, it's too much liability and personally invasive.

your company made it easy... If you left on bad terms, or with an immature company/boss/process, you might need days to go through the process... Or the company might argue and say your number is on to many cards/documents/etc and want to fight you to keep it... Even if it's clear on paper the number is yours.

I get where Rachel is coming from here. I think a decade ago when I had a separate phone for work was my least stressful time working... Unfortunately (in this case) I work for a University which I also attended school as a benefit, so the work/personal line got blurred for 6-7 years. Even though I finished my masters degree, it's become familiar to have "work" on my personal device now, when I used to be like Rachel -- separate work phone for the first 7-8 years I was working.

I'm happy she wrote this article, it's encouraging me to consider a low cost provider like Google Fi with an old phone and going back to the work/personal separation.

Like I've pointed out to others, I have nothing to say about other companies. I speak only about this one company where Rachel claimed that it would cause turmoil if you attempted to transfer your number out.

Rachel didn't actually raise a request for number transfer, so this was conjecture. I've gone through the process, and it was smooth. That's why I think it's a mole hill.

Everyone is saying "yes but at other companies...". Sure. I concede that. Just not at this one company.

You don’t think that claiming this is a non-issue (or mole hill) requires unjustifiably generalizing your good experience at your one company?

Normally no. But it’s based on the exact same company that OP made the assertion based on. And the relevant bit is this - I actually used the process, they didn’t. They were sharing conjecture, I was sharing experience.

At a big co, competence of whoever you are dealing with in HR might vary a lot depending on who you happen to be working with that day. Maybe they could also have improved some processes since she worked there.

I share an employer in my work history with her. I feel she captures some things I didn't like about the place pretty well, without hyperbole.

> I always felt that some of the writing on this blog had a tendency to make mountains out of mole hills. I can't say for sure about the rest of it, but this is definitely a mole hill.

The thing is that the "fast path" or "happy path" of things is always nice and streamlined. It's when things start going wrong that it matters. If you marry yourself too heavily to a company you start losing your leverage. Depending on where you are and who you work with, things can get real dirty, and if your stuff is all intertwined with their stuff, that can add up to a lot of pain and suffering.

This is not a universal experience. I had to go through this recently with a large technology company, and it took multiple weeks of back and forth between the company and a major US carrier to confirm that the company wanted to release the number. If I had lost access to the internal ticketing system in the meantime, I am not sure what I would have done short of asking a coworker to take on the cause.

Most importantly, I had no idea a priori how long and involved the process would be.

Agree that it's not hard to port numbers. I think the larger potential issue is if you are working for a smaller company that is not as smooth with these transactions, or if you end up with an acrimonious situation where — whoops, we forgot to give you the porting key and now your phone number has been lost and there's literally no way to pull it back.

Like I said, it might be different at other companies. I only pointed out at the specific company Rachel mentioned, the process is smooth.

Good point, but incomplete. It's safe to assume the company improved their process over time.

The point stands that it may be a hassle at other companies. Furthermore, you are beholden to the company until then.

Besides the complexity, I think there's still merit in keeping the path the to the exit clear

If you're considering leaving a company, it's just another irem to have to deal with on the way out