We believe that having the right equipment is crucial to being effective at work. As a fully remote company, we don't have an office. This means you don't have access to the equipment you'd normally find in an office. We do our best to use the money we'd normally spend on an office to provide everyone with the equipment they need to do their job.
We give everyone a $3000 stipend to spend on their laptop and any other equipment they need for their home office.
Apart from the computer you use, it's largely down to you to decide what you need to work effectively. That said, there are a few essentials that you must buy or show you already have. You may buy your equipment from local vendors, it does not need to be through the links below, these are just suggestions. Let's talk through this...
The first "must have" on the list is your computer, obviously. You can choose from the list of pre-approved options below. Don't worry, we have both Mac and PC options. Please note that if you prefer to get a Windows machine, you will NEED to get one with Windows 11 Pro Operating System. If you accidentally got Windows Home, please contact IT on your first day via the Service Desk.
We recommend the following machines:
All items purchase via the home office stipend are owned by Oyster whilst you work at the company. If in the future you decide the leave, the computer will remain owned by Oyster, and the ownership of all other equipment will be transferred to the employee. Why?
<aside> 🕐 TL;DR: IT security.
</aside>
As we are a distributed company with employees around the world, we need to be especially careful with our IT security to manage the risks that come with operating this way.
As well as these inherent risks, as our customers change over time from startups to larger enterprises, IT security will become a more important point for them. Eventually they will require us to be ISO certified for them to use us, which IT security is a major part of.
These are some of the things we need to be able to do to keep ourselves and our customers' data safe.
To achieve these things, we need to own the devices outright. It's unreasonable to ask employees to give so much control over the device to their employer if you own it.