Comment by bmulholland
Comment by bmulholland 2 days ago
Eh, from the company's perspective this is logistically easiest--the laptop's value is hardly worth the effort.
Comment by bmulholland 2 days ago
Eh, from the company's perspective this is logistically easiest--the laptop's value is hardly worth the effort.
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.
If you scrap a laptop you get a nice, auditable, chain of custody from the end user to the company that will certify it's been destroyed. If you sell someone their old laptop you need to ensure that it's actually been wiped, not just "I copied my files over and started using the new one". I've seen a few IT departments be not great at "Sam got their new laptop two weeks ago, someone should follow up now to see if the wipe on the old one happened".
One choice won't get you fired, the other might save you a bit of cash.
If they sell to (ex-)employees they sell to consumers. This then includes consumer warranties etc.
However what large companies do is to get an agreement with a refurbishing company, which will collect and refurbish them and and pay the corporation some share.
This works in some mix calculation - the well treated machines can be sold well, some machines can be used to reuse some parts and some machines are nothing but cost for disposal.
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.
I actually did it. This was back in the times when you could get a job the next day, and my new employer didn't want me keeping anything from the old employer by the time I started. Old employer was dragging their feet on the shipping label and made it clear that failure to return the equipment would be considered theft. I gave them a week of daily reminder emails with an approaching deadline (no response), then handed it to the cops as abandoned property. Got a few HR calls immediately afterwards asking how to pick it up, and an annoyed police call asking me not to do it again.
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.
a lot of companies ask for equipment to be returned due to security concerns, or just on principle