> It would never occur to me to use an employer's hardware for such a purpose

That's a very uncommon mindset and worldview.

For 99% of people, the default would be "I'm going to join this Zoom meeting from the laptop I use all day long to join Zoom meetings, and I'm going to code using the laptop I use all day long to code".

Lots of people have their work tools setup on their work computer, but not on their personal computer. Their personal laptop might be relatively underpowered and struggle to run all the required software efficiently during an interview. The issue becomes even more significant as more of the tools used require an account - you don't want your interview performance to suffer because you're using an unfamiliar tool or service, so you just use the ones you're used to using every day.

What I'm seeing here is that Binance has the IT culture of a SV start-up when it should have the IT culture of a bank. Sounds to me like a thug with a $10 wrench could've been just as effective.

> Lots of people have their work tools setup on their work computer, but not on their personal computer...you don't want your interview performance to suffer because you're using an unfamiliar tool or service...

I struggle to come up of even the most absurd interview scenario where the tool makes the difference especially in our field where if a FOSS tool is not standard, then there's a sufficiently powerful free tier (eg., Sublime, IntelliJ). Heck most remote interviews, they take you out of your tools completely and ask you to code on some shared browser-based editor.

> That's a very uncommon mindset and worldview.

I'm calling HN SV start-up bias. Outside of the startup software eng'g industry, a lot of people exercise very good separation between work tools and personal tools. I know a lawyer, _who's the head of his own law firm,_ bring his personal laptop to the office just so he could purchase tickets during office hours.

I think this is also down to a few factors:

- SWEs are typically issued high-end machines in contrast to other professions whose standard issue is still 4GB (or 8GB, if you're lucky) RAM. For those professions buying a better personal laptop is a low bar to clear.

- SWEs are more efficient when they have admin access to their own machines. Though it begs the question that maybe some inefficiency would've been an acceptable tradeoff to $6.3B.

- SWE is one of the professions on the poster for the "Get paid good while working from Bali" lifestyle, wherein BYOD is implied, especially if you are freelancing.