Comment by zem
Comment by zem 2 days ago
on the positive side, it's a small thing monetarily, but retention of company laptops is a nice goodwill gesture
Comment by zem 2 days ago
on the positive side, it's a small thing monetarily, but retention of company laptops is a nice goodwill gesture
Eh, from the company's perspective this is logistically easiest--the laptop's value is hardly worth the effort.
a lot of companies ask for equipment to be returned due to security concerns, or just on principle
A company which is even moderately "OK" at IT will already have the means to instantly lock and securely wipe devices of any employee at a moments notice. Doing this during a RIF is a hell of a lot better than making the mail room deal with a bunch of filthy laptops.
A large bunch of big companies, including some of the biggest on the planet don't even sell past-end-of-life laptops to their current employees.
Let that sink in. They're not even willing to <<sell>> old laptops, they would rather scrap them and contribute to pollution and overall waste.
One former employer had this policy, and also refused to provide a way to ship said equipment back. No one was happy with my alternative solution: leaving it at the police station instead.
A former employer said that FedEx shipping info would be attached to my separation email. It was not. I emailed the two people at HR who had been involved in my separation. Three times each. No replies.
I still have the laptop. And a hard copy of the emails.
Also, as an aside, it is ABSURDLY easy to bypass MDM and DEP on a Macbook Pro, even a later M series laptop. Absurdly so (anyone here could do it in about a minute or less, and have a de-MDMed, fully updatable, no weirdness laptop. Theoretically).
“Welcome to your new job at HighSpeed TopFlight. Here’s an old, used laptop.”
And yet only one company I've ever worked for went this way.
I wish more did; it really is such a small goodwill gesture to departing employees.
It's a huge "depends". Different areas have different recycling opportunities. Some hardware providers have their own buyback/replacement programs. Also some companies may want to reimage and reuse the returned hardware. Finally you want some stock of temporary laptops available for people who are waiting for repairs so some functioning used ones are great for that.
Yeah at the BigCorps I was at, old laptops (as long as they weren’t more than 3-4 years old) were usually reimaged and kept on hand as spares or for interns, etc. But I imagine after a large layoff they ended up with way more than they’d ever actually need.
Many of them are fully depreciated and worth nothing, or nearly so, on paper anyway. Any new employees won't want an old laptop. And it will cost time and money to deal with shipping, storage, cleaning, re-imaging, etc. On average, the bean counters must figure it's cheaper to let people keep them.