BYOD: The inevitable reality

The reality is that companies must find ways to decrease overhead without sacrificing product quality. They must increase profitability to attract investment money to continue to grow, to innovate and to explore. One significant way to do that is to allow employees to bring their own devices (laptops, smart phones, tablets) to work and use them.

In other words, I have to invest in my employer and I won't get a dime in return. With BYOD I have to accept that I have to foot a part of the bill for the costs of operating belonging to my employer. Since the premise is that employers are too cheapskate to buy their own kit, I probably won't get remunerated for providing IT infrastructure.

As a "bonus" I now have to accept "guide lines, policies and restrictions" on a device that is my property, my responsibility and my liability. No thanks.

BYOD sounds like a new buzz word for mooching off of someone.

Funny thing. I didn't notice the byline on this article until I saw the claim that arguments against BYOD had no real merit.

That was so incredibly stupid that I had to look up to see the author. Sure enough, it was Ken Hess.

On a contract, I'm willing to bring my own hardware because I act as an independent businessman. Somebody who wants to hire me as an employee had better d@mned well provide the resources to do the job. I am allowed to infer all I want from their refusal to do that, including the fact that I don't want to work for them.

> Since the premise is that employers are too cheapskate to buy their own kit, I probably won't get remunerated for providing IT infrastructure.

Professionals have always been expected to provide their own tools. It's merely trickling down to non-professionals now. It's the newest version of a trickle-down economy. :)

> As a "bonus" I now have to accept "guide lines, policies and restrictions" on a device that is my property, my responsibility and my liability. No thanks.

Good luck with any company enforcing that.

> BYOD sounds like a new buzz word for mooching off of someone.

Pretty much, yes. But he's right that it's still inevitable, simply because business procurement systems can't keep up with the rate of change in technology.

> Sure enough, it was Ken Hess.

Yep. BYOD is the new virtualization, obviously.

Bucking the tide here-- he makes some good points. Like the bogus security argument-- "once that device walks out the door, you have neither security nor control." Yep. It's especially bogus when they make you use Windows in any form, inside or outside. Maybe I had bad luck, but every job I ever had stuck employees with cr@ppy computers and didn't support them worth a darn. My last one was a real prizewinner because there was this corporate mania for standardization and uniformity in every last little thing. There was no good reason for it; I think it was a disorder.

So we remote workers got these cr@ppy Lenovo consumer laptops instead of real Thinkpads, and they were locked down nearly to unusability. Which wouldn't have slowed any malware down, they just got in the way of us doing our work. I always end up using my own stuff anyway just so I can do actual work. Maybe somewhere there are sane bosses who ask what employees need and then give it to them.

> Maybe somewhere there are sane bosses who ask what employees need and then give it to them.

Maybe. But I don't think I've ever been there.

@tc:

He makes a number of good points, but that doesn't address the problem of employee resistance. If there are no alternatives, maybe it works. If there are...maybe not.

This is, as acknowledged at the beginning, a follow-up piece to a debate on the topic, in which Ken Hess and Heather Clancy participated and took opposing positions on the given proposition.

Perhaps he views the blogs and columns (and perhaps even the news section) of ZDNet and similar publications as being in large part a sort of debate club, run somewhat along the lines of a wrestling league or reality show with lots of showy drama. He does seem to tailor the quality of his arguments to the specific outlet in which he expresses himself.

In fact, I some time ago concluded that this "debate club" approach is fundamentally how Ken Hess views his job -- he may or may not consider himself to be or to be acting as a "journalist", but more often than not (in the work of his that I've read) as a professional debater and entertainer (one who sometimes confuses the issue by sporadically engaging in actual journalism).

I would further speculate that Hess expects his more sophisticated readers to understand this, and have little trouble over it, with an "everyone knows that's how this game is played" attitude.

But since this is part of a debate, he's going to throw out every argument that occurs to him, whether it really makes sense or not; this is about the show -- the contest, and who "wins" -- not about who's really right.

BernardSwiss: Notwithstanding your initials, +1!

What I noticed a well: You can say nonsensical things, asking your readers: "What do you think?", then taking experience from the comments and writing the next article.

In my article, I write: "Strawberry's are pink. Maybe not yet, but it's inevitable. What do you think?" Commenters say: "No, they're red, and in the foreseeable future it will stay that way". Though some other smart commenter might bring in his gene-knowledge to explain how pink strawberries could be possible. Using that commenter experience, you can write a smart follow up.

I would buy my own equipment in a new york minute. there would be no way it would be windows and then my company would actually have to write web pages that aren't just for one browser.

but my company would not do it cause of "security" - yes I work for a company that thinks security is writing internet exploder only web pages.

I know it would not happen because of what tc said "My last one was a real prizewinner because there was this corporate mania for standardization and uniformity in every last little thing. There was no good reason for it; I think it was a disorder."

It really is a disorder.

@jsusanka: There's nothing wrong with standardization and uniformity, when applied correctly, sensibly, and not going overboard with it. Standards are how we're able use different web browsers to view the same web pages, after all. Some company that "standardizes" on IE obviously doesn't understand the whole idea of standards very much, especially these days now that IE6 is long since dead and unsupported and even the latest IE9 supports web standards quite well. Sticking with IE6 today is utterly idiotic.

In an environment where a support organization has to support the computing hardware and software of thousands of users, it lowers costs when you have uniformity and standards. You buy stuff in bulk and get discounts, there's only so many configurations to deal with, etc. But again you can't take it too far; sometimes certain teams need something non-standard to do something special, so you need to accommodate that as best you can (perhaps deviating from the standard minimally, rather than just tossing it out), or you can just not support that team (which works fine with engineering teams, not so well with accounting and HR teams for instance). You can't ask IT lackeys to be experts on every piece of computing equipment or software in existence.

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.

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.

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.

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.