Three.

My employer's laptop, my client's laptop, and my personal laptop.

I enjoy HN for many reasons, one of which is to encounter approaches that I would not even consider. I would not use my employer's laptop for personal, let alone a side-gig purpose, with a 10 foot pole. It's not mine, I have no control of it, I have no visibility into what is being monitored nor how it is used, where the data goes, what I should install on it, etc. Employer has full legal right to request it back this evening.

Big +1 on that. I assume a model where my work laptop screen is being directly mirrored into a room with 100 people watching it 24x7, basically. Entirely impossible, but every organization has some level of monitoring between zero and my theoretical scenario, so I carry a personal device and completely sidestep the entire issue.

And I've setup everything from scratch. There is no software on there that I wouldn't install on my personal machine. If anyone wanted access to it they'd have to ask me for a password noone else knows.

Yes, it is perfectly reasonable and in many cases prudent to not use your companies laptop for home-use. So you may chose not to do it.

That the company would own everything you did on it is still completely unreasonable.

Not to negate your point, but a related pondering : I would assume that the Venn diagram of companies that make claim on property created on their laptops ; vs companies that let you install fresh OS and software from image and repository of your choice and access work network / store proprietary data ; is practically zero.

(If you did not install fresh OS from image of your choice, then you did not install software from scratch and should not be confident what's in your work laptop and what it's doing / monitoring)

Yes.

It's not your equipment, you didn't buy it, you can't just do whatever you want with it. It's like being given a company car but going on a 3,000-mile roadtrip "because why should I have my own car if you gave me this one?"

It's not remotely unreasonable to expect someone not to use their employer's equipment to make money on the side, especially for something like a laptop which over the course of what a developer earns in 4-5 years is basically nothing.

> It is completely unreasonable as a blanket statement.

I personally find your position unreasonable: that you should be entitled to use property that is not yours how you see fit, because it’s more convenient to you.

In reality, any sane organization wouldn’t punish you for reading the news on your work computer, but to assert you should be given access seems unreasonable to me. You’re paid to do a job and they provide some tools for you to use to complete that job.

Why not just buy a laptop and ask your employer to pay its depreciation? It's way easier for both parties I think.

Really you should use a dumb terminal and keep corporate and personal materials on separate machines.

If your company ever ends up in legal hot water, you’ll be glad you kept a physical separation between your personal affairs and work equipment. See for example the Enron emails, which were made public as part of discovery and include thousands of personal emails from people who used their work email as personal email.