The only thing I work on that my job provided is the laptop, which they purchased for me after realizing my own was a bit too old. External monitor, mouse, keyboard, stand, etc. all came from home.
Even in shops where software is the business I've been given a standard Dell laptop for development. The IT folks didn't want to bother with procuring different laptops for different business functions, so everybody got the same thing.
It could be abrasive if the rapport isn't there. But a good manager will build that over time until the point were blunt honest questions can be answered bluntly and honestly with no cause for concern.
I use both. Time machine in my home to back up mine and the wife's macs and Arq to offsite backup a subset of my home directory (docs, music, photos, settings).
Google has the same thing. Larry, Sergey, Eric all have shares that carry 10x the votes of regular Class A shares so they can still exercise control if their holdings fall below 50%.
In the book "Voyager : seeking newer worlds in the third great age of discovery" they said that as the crafts got further out they had to use large radio antenna's in Spain, Hawaii, and Australia to lock onto the signal, creating an Earth-scale virtual antenna.
Retirement savings is the longest-term of all long-term investments.
My 401K got torn to pieces during this recession. My first reaction was "How can I buy more?". That's when I started maxing out the 401K and buying additional stock in the form of index funds. Those actions have made my personal recovery from the market plummet much quicker with the upside that I now own stock with a lower dollar-cost-average.
I did a pseudo-agile process for a project where I was the solo developer. A lot of agile practices scale down quite nicely: defined scope, sprints, unit testing, etc. The key is to keep everything small: short sprints, small features or small parts of large features. ALWAYS deliver a shippable product at the end of each sprint, even if its just for morale purposes.
Yup, in Mahwah area, up Route 17 near the NY border. The NYSE built a massive data center there specifically for colocation of high frequency trading operations, even going so far as ensuring each customers switch runs are the same length. It was on 60:Minutes a while ago.
I got screwed by a policy like that years ago when I moved from the DoD back into the private sector. I was honest (and naive) when filling out the HR paperwork and listed my low gov't salary. Come to find out later they knocked 15K off the salary.