Have you ever done something for yourself on your (job) company's infrastructure?

What's up with all these ask lemmy posts asking us to self incriminate?

To be fair: if your HR department can link your Lemmy posts to you, they are insanely bored and presumably over funded.

You mean legally when I'm allowed/entitled to? All the time. I max out my benefits.

Based
- Why? If I'm allowed, I consider it part of my salary, and would be stupid not to cash it in.

No, I'm not stupid. Also technically everything you create on company time and/or company resources no longer belongs to you.

I did have a boss once (software development) who hosted his own website on the company servers. Not 100% sure if that was ever green lit by the CEO (maybe, maybe not). But I was really annoyed when the server had issues due to that private site, when I didn't have access to the code to fix them.

My boss tried to take some stuff I created on company time once, I didn’t mind though since I wasn’t keeping that shit.

The company's PCs were running XP, but had Windows 7 Pro license stickers on their back. I wrote down a few license codes for using them at home. One of those is now my Windows 11 Pro license.

Any time I'm in the office, I make sure to take a nice long relaxing crap.

Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime
That's why I poop on company time

My manager actually wants me to host a Minecraft server on company hardware to test our performance monitoring system, aren't I lucky

Now if only I knew how to get players on it who aren't my friends

Could've just run a benchmark or mine monero or something... A Minecraft server is arguably one of the worst ways to test performance
- There's a grafana exporter for it, can monitor the JVM
  It's not testing the performance of the machine it's testing performance monitoring tools

I was working in my (poor third world) government job, and our keyboard broke. Replacements took months, since they only bought mouse and keyboards in bulk once per year or so, and they ran out of.

I had a second job working as a contractor for a private company, where we were contracted for a public hospital providing system administration and technical support. We had some old PS2 keyboards that were to be decommissioned, but since they didn't have inventory number, I got hold of them and brought some to my other job.

So I donated some equipment from one area of government to another, but it was kinda illegal, lol 😆.

I tend not to. Assume no privacy of any work device given to you.

My company has never touched my work laptop, it was shipped directly from Apple. But then we're a small start-up.
- Apple can preconfigure a machine with any software a company requests at the factory
- Same, I use it as my personal device too. I’m not even sure that I should send the pc back at all, probably yes

This was more of a community service, but when I worked for a university office I ran a TOR node on one of my PCs. After a while though, IT sent someone to ask me kindly not to make it an exit node. Other than that they didn't seem to mind. It was nice having excess bandwidth.

I also ran some distributed computing apps like folding@home.

I was issued a monitor in the early days of COVID when they were sending us home to work. We already had laptops. They had literally pallettes of monitors, people were just grabbing one or two. Tracking was through the honor system, writing name and number taken on a piece of paper.

Now they're having us go back into the office ~3 days a week and want us to return the monitors. Lol, no.

What's the justification for having you back in the office?
- New people who don't know wtf they are doing because we don't have structured training and our written documentation is piss poor and we're overall bad at helping them. Some new college grad botched a multi-million dollar program and come to find out, they weren't getting any meaningful mentoring or guidance.
  The thought is we will be better at seeing these sorts of gaps earlier if we're having real conversations, not just the routine PowerPoint presentations sanitized to show all is good.
  Could a team train and mentor via virtual interaction only? Sure. Can this particular team? Nope.

My colleagues back in the early bitcoin and cryptocurrency days were mining across any spare infra and customer servers they could get their hands on. Back when you could do it with just CPU.

I got a company to install an extra consumer grade internet connection with a different ISP on top of the main (already redundant) business one.

Sold it to them as being best for redundancy and to make sure that if sync traffic between our 6 locations was heavy, it wouldn't impact the main line.

The main line was actually more than sufficient to handle 100x the heaviest traffic we ever had. We were right next to a university, which got us a hookup to the national backbone on fiber (this was in the age of T1 and T3 lines being the norm, 2 of those 6 locations had to make due with 256KB lines), so it was rock stable, blistering fast and because it was backbone connected, utterly and completely unrestricted and unmonitored by third party.

But the advantage of consumer lines in that period was that cable and DSL were starting to become common for consumers, at speeds comparable to most business internet lines. These also usually had dynamic IPs.

This was simply so my and my colleagues internet and at the time Napster traffic wouldn't show up on the traffic logs and wouldn't be identifiable by our official IP range :p

Nice try boss

a long time ago I worked at an event production company, we bought a plastic card (think credit cards) full color printer to print client logos on NFC cards, and I had to test them, so I printed McLovin's driver licence on a card, and I still keep it on my wallet.

Instead of using a space heater like everyone else, I run Folding@Home on one of my work machines to pump out a few hundred watts of heat. That way at least someone is getting some Alzheimer's research out of burning that electricity.

- Most of the space heaters that I've seen are like 1,500 watts. According to the UPS this computer is plugged into, it consumes around 650 watts. So it's not as powerful as a space heater, but when the exhaust is pointed directly at your legs, it gets plenty warm.
Haha this is actually an awesome idea. My work has a bunch of super cheap servers for sale that could totally be used as a space heater. Actually a super cool concept because there are so many good servers and cpus being thrown out that could legitimately be used as a space heater.

I guess so if you count using software licenses. But it's not exactly a big secret. Not like the company is losing anything if I do.

I worked at a car dealership that put out very nice, fresh muffins for the customers. I was a drug addict at the time and wasn't spending money on food so that's where I ate

When I need to run multiple vms, work laptop is much stronger than personal laptop and there is usually no personal data related so sure. I've also used the only (work) iPhone I have for Apple related things, like using apple books, which is admittedly stupid but I consider anything I get from there single use either way and not particularly private either.

In 1999 when the entire town was on dialup, I set up this relatively small PC with FreeBSD 3.3 and eggdrop, and hid it in the school library. That way I had an IRC bot that worked while I was offline. After a while I also set it up to automatically grab files from FTP servers for me, but getting these out from the "server" offline was tricky due to 1.44MB floppies being the only removable storage I had available.

Back then internet carried dialup charges per minute for me, so this was a huge time and money saver.

I’ve taken smartphones and laptops, given for work but then never returned when leaving. Nothing permanent for hosting but I have used our infra for games and file sharing.

I'm allowed to use my company's laptop for private purposes as long as it doesn't have negative impact on work (like installing mallicious or unlicensed software). I don't use that priviledge a lot but I store some private backups on the company's OneDrive.

I used a forklift to move a car that blocked me into my parking space. I’d already put in my two weeks though and the whole “losing unemployment because I was fired with cause” sucked. Worth though.

Printing/scanning on the company printer. Was careful at a corporate job as I suspected they might monitor what I send to the printer or what the printer scans, so I was low-key with that

Yeah, I'm running my personal NAS on the company's electricity bill 😁.

Yeah, totally. I lived rural with a poor connection at the time.

Company had a remote server in a data centre for our CRM, website and such as we had people in three locations. total overkill really for what we needed in my opinion and it was 99% idle in the evenings.

So I used it to host half life deathmatch and team fortress back in the day when these were cutting edge. Four to six players each night having fun we couldn't have had otherwise.

Fuck off, fed.