You are supposed to bring your device. If you don’t have one you can get a loan to buy one and pay it off by paycheque deductions.
Once hired, you do get a “laptop refresh bonus” every 3 years, the problem being that it’s a bonus and so is subject to income tax, plus in some jurisdictions you can’t tax deduct computer purchases unless you are self-employed, so the purchasing power of the laptop refresh allowance is basically halved; i always ended up having to top up from my own money to get a decent laptop every 3 years.
The cost of a well-specced business laptop would be between 1% and 5% total pre-tax yearly compensation for engineers (variable depending on skills, location, seniority and the fact that I need to fudge the data a bit to avoid disclosing actual salaries which I obviously cannot do ;) ).
The argument I saw brought up when I was working at Canonical (before the weird hiring process thing, n.b.) made some sense:
They explicitly wanted you to buy a laptop in your country using what's available to you so as to artificially widen the laptops with good ubuntu support: the reasoning was that you being a Canonical employee means you're more likely to help get the bugs fixed.
In practice however I don't think the diversity of laptops in the company was that great, we ended up with the same bunch of thinkpads and dells you'd expect from any random group of nerds (with a few exotics thrown in perhaps, but not many).
One requirement was to use Ubuntu on your laptop. I think they relaxed that over the years, even if working on not-ubuntu would definitely get you looks and comments at get togethers.
Having people source random laptops to help increase compatibility doesn't seem like a terrible idea, but the company definitely should reimburse you for the purchase. I certainly can't blame them for dogfooding their own OS either.
Having to buy your laptop out of pocket is stingy to the point that I'd be reconsidering my employment. That's a pure cost-of-doing-business expense that the company should cover.
Well, they do give you a lump sum every 3 years to buy whatever laptop you want with.
Personally, I was fine with this: I had a laptop I was already doing open source work with, no reason for me to change (I did open source work with my same laptop, as usual, and got paid for it).
Of all the things I could criticize my ex employer about, this isn't one of them frankly. Could they give a lump sum at hiring? Yeah maybe. Could the frequency be increased? Sure...
They made up for that kind of stuff by a lot by flying you around the world a few times a year for a week or more, in my book.
At my last contract job the company supplied the laptop we had to use, and that made me sigh before it even arrived. It was restrictive, with its controlled accounts and restrictions on what software could be used, which meant I couldn't use the best tools I know well. The software we could use was poor quality. It had very poor battery life and it also meant I needed to carry two laptops everywhere with me in practice, the other being my own. After all there was no way I'd consider it safe to put my personal files and personal projects on the work-controlled laptop.
I much prefer to use my own laptop for work when possible. Just one to carry around and it's a good machine, worth the expense. Two jobs ago was like that, and it was a much nicer way to work.
I do understand why each job had their way of doing things though. The more recent contract involved access to proprietary code they didn't want to get out and potentially sensitive patient data. When the contract ended I couldn't login to the laptop any more.
Whereas the older job was all open source development, with a matching culture, so we were encouraged to use whatever tools worked best and keep publishing our work, and issues with work and personal files on the same device weren't a problem.
That said, despite proprietary work being the usual case, in 20 years all work I've done has been using my own devices except for that one recent contract, so I found getting a work-supplied laptop to be unusual.
Isn't that a problem with the company policies? Any company with heavily locked down laptops probably won't be happy to let you BYOD. I have a work supplied laptop but I run my own OS on it.
The real issue here seems to be around expensing. You shouldn't have to pay tax on a laptop you use for work. Think about it as getting 80-100% more hardware for the same money.
It's weird but I think there could be a significant benefit for a company that makes an operating system that users are installing themselves. This policy means their staff will use a diverse set of hardware, some brand new, some old, some home-built. That leads to natural dogfooding and might result in a better product.
