Utterly idiotic

Story: BYOD: The inevitable realityTotal Replies: 3
Author Content
Grishnakh

Oct 21, 2011
11:31 AM EDT
How does this moron Ken Hess keep a job? I've never seen anything so stupid here on LXer. He's obviously never worked in corporate IT. Yes, they actually DO keep spare parts around, because number of models they support is relatively small, so when a power supply dies or a DVD-ROM cr@ps out, they can replace it immediately so the employee can go back to work. If an employee is making $100k/year, that translates to $50/hour. This doesn't even count the fully-loaded cost, after you add in payroll taxes, FICA matching, the cost of cubicle space and other office costs, etc. The cost of a computer compared to that is tiny, and any company that tries to save money by eliminating computer costs is one that is short-sighted beyond belief.

Finally, what do you do when employees bring their own stuff, and it's running Linux but the company wants to use Outlook for email, and the employee refuses to buy Windows? Or better yet, what if the employee uses pirated versions of software, and you have a BSA raid? Sorry, the computer belonging to the employee isn't going to get you out of that one, because it's on your property and used for your business, so you're liable.
hkwint

Oct 22, 2011
4:59 PM EDT
There's some benefit in it, at least in 'bring your own software'. You don't want to know all the time I wasted on Windows trying to do some grep / sed / awk. Windows C library has some really awkward quirks which makes 'cmd' not work with certain escape sequences / pipes after the 'findstr' command.

So - as most people probably know - DOS batch file scripting really s*cks, I don't want to waste my time learning MSH if I'm already familiar with awk and sed. Some tasks I could have done within 10 minutes on my home-computer running Gentoo or even Ubuntu, but on Windows took me three hours.

I had a job where I did to do some 'Excel file-linking', only to find out Excel simply _couldn't do it_. So I wrote some macro to export our whole yada to .csv, and then used Windows-ports of sed and awk and grep in a Dos-file to perform my magic. In both the job before and my current job I also use AutoIT, as I can never get the hang of VB / VBA (in my opinion especially VBA is a nightmare, probably because it's not what I'm used to). I also linked AutoIt to gvim (autoit starts gvim with some file opened and then starts some gvim macro). This saves me some time, efforts and more important: It saves mistakes!

Two jobs back in the larger company, I couldn't install all that stuff - as it was made nearly impossible. Of course PortableApps saved part of my day, but for example I couldn't get Python ODBC-drivers installed. Even while those drivers would have saved me lots of time.
Grishnakh

Oct 22, 2011
8:40 PM EDT
With any decent manager, you could have done all that on your company computer too, esp. since you're saying you did these things with tools you can install on Windows (thanks to Cygwin) and download for free; I used Cygwin all the time in my last job. What happens when they want you to use some 4-figure software package? Are they going to expect you to buy that yourself? What if they require you to use Windows, because they need you to use software that only works on Windows? Are they going to require you to buy and install Windows too? I'll use it if it's given to me, but I refuse to spend my own money on MS software.

If your company won't let you install your own software, then how the heck do you do any software developing? You can't on a Windows computer that doesn't have admin access. And why on earth would a company that doesn't give you admin access to their computer let you have admin access on your own computer, and actually use that for work duties? And finally, how would the IT department handle backing up stuff on employees' personal computers? Require them to do their own backups with NAS boxes they purchase themselves too?

The whole thing reeks of stupidity and insanity.

ComputerBob

Oct 23, 2011
10:23 AM EDT
Quoting:How does this moron Ken Hess keep a job?


Apparently, he gets a lot of clicks. Partially due to the fact that, every time he publishes something, this site's users discuss it for days and days -- often in multiple threads.

That gives him a lot of free publicity, which increases his clicks.

Ignore him and maybe he'll go away.

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