Now that I'm 25 years into my software career, one thing that absolutely blows me away is just how few software engineers in my teams actually own their own computers. It's less than 50% for my current team. Meanwhile, I'm the weirdo with several (gaming PC, gaming laptop PC, and general purpose MBP) in addition to my work laptop.

> It was such a good experience that I opted to buy my son a decent gaming laptop to graduate him from consoles. Over the last year, the same thing has happened to him

I went through that experience with my son as well. He's never shown great interest in being taught computer stuff, but did want to help with a PC build. Now, he's tech support for his friends.

That sounds fine, if there is no corporate spyware inside.

> Meanwhile, I'm the weirdo with several (gaming PC, gaming laptop PC, and general purpose MBP) in addition to my work laptop.

That has more to do with gaming than with software engineering, doesn’t it.

I do use them for personal SW projects as well.

> That sounds fine,

Certainly, there's nothing "wrong" with that, but it does lead to specific scenarios, especially in cases of layoffs, where one could be in a position to not have a job or a computer to use for maintaining resumes, taking virtual interviews, etc. When I was laid off in 2022, there were several people that were panicking about that very fact.

It doesn’t make sense to own a laptop unless you will regularly use it. Quite a lot of people I know, just don’t really use one outside of their work commitments. So your home hardware sits and collects dust.

This does lead to what can only be described as an acrimonious custody battle whenever we do layoffs. High rates of "lost" equipment returns led to us ransomwaring the things to hold their unsynced personal data hostage until they return the equipment.

Is that really worth it to get back what I would assume is on average a 3 year old laptop? Do you then re-issue this old, used gear to your new hires?

That aside, using your work equipment for personal stuff (or vice-versa) is just a really dumb idea.

I see people say this all the time, but so far I have never seen any convincing arguments for why I should stop using my work laptop for personal use hah.

Even companies that don't necessarily want this stuff will have it forced on them by this or that auditor soon enough.

And that's just the privacy angle.

If you were to work on any personal projects on that company laptop now you have an intellectual property mess on your hands.

In the rare case there's still a depreciable value on the books there is an additional severance payment equivalent to the final "value".

It depends on the device. A 3 year old M1 MBP is virtually identical to an almost brand new M2 MBP. There's no need to chuck an M1 MBP in the trash (metaphorically and literally) just because it's "3 years old".

Now if it's a 3 year old low end Intel machine then I'd be more than happy if it went away.

If we can attest that no IP left with them and the device is out of its service life, sometimes we'll let them keep it out of pity. Ironically the most frequent justification is recognizance that they don't own a computer and can't easily look for another job.

Sorry, but that's a pretty dick thing to do to someone who just got laid off, especially considering it could otherwise be a write-off.

There are other factors too-- one new challenge terminations in a WFH world present is that after HR notifies them, the employee can simply not log out and still have access to the local filesystem...and external media. Or if they slammed the lid shut in anger, they'd later log back in to Windows using cached credentials in Airplane Mode.

So employees were regaining access and exfiltrating data indiscriminately. It's been much less of a clusterfuck if we just reset the FDE key once HR is done with them, then negotiate return of specific files they identify. (Sometimes we do let them keep the laptop too, after recovering their stuff and wiping the rest.)

I'm 15 years into my IT career and I'm amazed at how few of my colleagues seem to care about tech. They know their way around our company's instance of ServiceNow, or whatever their specific role demands of them, but there is very little curiosity, desire & wherewithal to branch out from their little space into something new.

When I had kids all of my hobbies stopped. There is no time left for anything non-essential.

I simply no longer have the time - or frankly mental energy - for curiosity. Right now I am typing this while supervising bath time for a 3 year old.

Hang in there!

I had a friend gently remind me that the reason he can be prolific at writing music these days and i "can't seem to find the time" is because i've raised 2 and currently am raising a third, and if he had kids he wouldn't write music either. My youngest turned 7 this year. Older two are out of the house.

It's still a good foot-in-the-door role for people who still can't access education or job experience reqs for tech, but it's also now one of the roles where you can just park, work 9-5, get a better wage than retail, and not have to corral shopping carts. The tech end of internal IT support has moved more to SRE/ops roles.

Hardware company IT is marginally more interesting but it's still more interested in tagging hardware than understanding it.

I now have a lot of friends with kids and some of them are teenagers. I've had some concern in my mind for a while now - their total knowledge of tech comes down to asking for a wifi password and watching prank videos (or whatever) on an app. When you ask them what they want to do when they grow up they say "influencer"... The most technical thing they know how to do is reboot "the router" when the internet is down. The second diagnostic step is to yell that the internet is down.

They're great kids and I'm not criticizing them but I've had some concerns that there might not be anyone around to keep the lights on when our generation is gone. In our day using a computer and getting on the internet had huge barriers to entry but that came with the benefit of an explosion in tech talent.

My point is it's great to hear there are still some nerdy kids out there getting under the covers!

I mean, thinking back to the '80s, I was probably one out of maybe 3 kids in my entire class who even had a home computer, let alone knew how to do anything more than play games.

Back to the '90s, many more classmates had computers, but only a tiny, tiny few of us knew how to program and edit CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT.

Back to the early 2000s, I was the only person I knew with greater than a dial-up Internet connection or who knew the difference between a local and public IP address.

99.5% have always been laypeople, and that's OK. For every 200 kids today who only know how to ask their mom for the WiFi password, there's one who is setting up a home lab, and that's enough for the world's tech needs in twenty years.

This was 1993. There was no broadband. We almost went 10-BASE2 due to cost. I remember we had a Netware server and two computers. It was kind of overkill but it was fun!

I've since sent him some suggestions :)

No video games, no PC tinkering and overlocking, no EE degree.