Why Do Companies REALLY Let You Keep Laptops After Layoffs? The Enterprise Problem Unveiled
When a company does mass layoffs, and it gets announced that the employees get to keep their equipment, that is not a feature. That is a bug. And it gets paraded and celebrated as, like, look how wonderful this company is. Everybody gets to keep their laptops. Now, of course, the company is probably running, an MDM or UEM and has completely wiped that device as part you know, like, you see, like, the screens, like, you can't log in.
Speaker 1:You have to reinstall the operating system. Company does a victory lap. Like, look how wonderful we are. Yeah. We did these layoffs, and they were really sad and bad, but we let everybody keep all their gear.
Speaker 1:So we're we're great. Wonderful pat, you know, pat on the back. Look. We gave everybody their their 1 or 2 year old MacBooks, and we should be applauded. Right?
Speaker 1:And a lot of times, you see media fall for the strap and you see, you know, that become kind of the violent. Oh, look. They're so amazing. They laid off a 1,000 people, but they let everybody keep their laptops. Like, they're so wonderful.
Speaker 1:The reality of that situation, it's a bug, not a feature. Right? What do I mean by that? That company has no process or ability to take and ask for a 1,000 people or whatever the the size of that riff was to ship their laptop back to them for them to intake it, to evaluate it, to certify it, to take and do something with it, to reuse it, to redeploy it back into their fleet and give it to, you know, to other employees to cycle through it or whatever it is, even to e waste it or to donate it to to charity or in schools. Like, they have no mechanism.
Speaker 1:There's no ability for them. The cost to the company of taking and reclaiming that gear and reusing that gear, it's not worth it. So what so what happens instead? They tell everybody, you get to keep your stuff. Yay.
Speaker 1:We're so wonderful. What gets presented on the surface? Is it necessarily the reality as you start scratching a few things off? And I will tell you that this is becoming a pretty you can tell the maturity of the of a business out at this point by how they deal with their equipment and their equipment cycles and their IT assets. And in a lot of cases, most companies have just figured out like, hey, when we buy something, it's just deployed and it's gone.
Speaker 1:If it's out there in the field, it's just never coming back. And it gets it gets associated into onboarding costs. When they hire, it fires off a trigger where they have an assumed, there should be an assumed life cycle with that gear. Right? Like we bought you a laptop, it should last x years, and then you go buy another one.
Speaker 1:I'll tell you that some businesses, you'd see this handled where they don't even buy the equipment. They just give the person a credit. Like, hey. You know, here's $2,000. Go buy whatever you want.
Speaker 1:Use your existing box. Don't. We don't care. Which introduces a whole another complications because you start talking about corporate owned data and how you do how you manage corporate data, how do you impose policies if it's if it's an employee device. It gets it gets really like, it's really interesting.
Speaker 1:NIST actually has a standard, really deals with cell phones more than PCs around it's called co corporate owned personally enabled devices. How do you how do you you know? I mean, you can tell as an IT team, you can tell your your employees, hey. Don't put anything personal in this box because we're gonna delete it at some point. And then you find out, like, people just use their work equipment as their personal equipment.
Speaker 1:And then it's a little crazy, but it makes sense because the work equipment's probably faster, newer, better, and they have to carry it all the time anyways. So why not just put all your family photos from your, you know, vacation with your children on your work device, and then you find out that the company has deleted the hard drive in the middle of the night, and you've lost all your photos of your kids, which is it's happened in the past. It'll happen in the future. It'll happen all the time. So don't believe the press release.
Speaker 1:It's not necessarily as good as they want you to believe it is. Is.
