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by Al-Khwarizmi 2018 days ago
Funny thing to say when we're in the middle of a global pandemic, and more people are working from home than ever.

I work at an university and I've been forced to install that crap on my home computer because I need to teach from home. And so do all the professors in around half the universities I know in my country.

1 comments

Interesting, I'm surprised that they don't have to provide you with the tools needed to do your job!

In Australia, the emp is generally responsible for providing any necessary tools or equipment needed to do the job (contractors are another matter though)

In normal circumstances they do provide the tools needed for the job, as they should. But this was a sudden state of emergency triggered by a pandemic, there were no funds, reactions weren't fast enough... so basically, they didn't.

Anyway, those of us who have research projects (as is my case) typically do have computers provided by the university at home, because research has strange schedules and working from home has always been a need (meeting with colleagues in different timezones, waiting for experiments to complete at night, rushing for deadlines, etc.).

But... it's not really practical to make room for two different desktop computers for my own use in an already spaced-starved flat, or to work in a laptop for many hours when I could do so in a desktop. So in practice, my home computer and my work computer are one and the same. And it's like that here for most, if not all, people I know.

We are a Latin country and also tend to live in small flats, maybe in other places it's different. I can imagine that if I had one of those American McMansions, it would make sense to have a home office with a sober, black work computer, a good camera setup and a green screen, and then a gaming room with a flashy gaming computer and huge speakers (near the billiards and darts room, probably :)). But that's not really how things work about here. Here, separation of home and work computers at home is almost exclusive of jobs with high security restrictions. Most people in normal jobs just don't do it because it's not practical.