It would be reasonable in my opinion to have this software on a computer that stays in the office, but developers at my company all bring their laptops home every day and also often work at home for either the entire day or part of the day. Employees have flexible work hours too. In practice, for developers at least, this laptop serves as both a work laptop and a personal laptop.
I feel really frustrated by this whole situation. I really like working at my company, and I work both at home and in the office. However, I don't feel comfortable installing this kind of monitoring, remote-access, root-control software on my computer, especially one that I bring home! I like how it is now that I can be logged into my personal email account on my work computer and know that I am the only one able to access it. We use our personal GitHub accounts also at work, and this will implicitly give my company access to it as I am logged into GitHub at work.
I understand that it's a company-owned laptop, but is it unreasonable of me to want this kind of software off the computer that I use? Would I have a hard time finding a reasonably-sized company that does not require this kind of software to be installed?
Ask\Demand a company laptop if one isn't provided then you don't have the required tools to do your job and find a different employer.
That's a poor assumption even with no monitoring software installed on you computer. If the company asked to access your computer immediately (e.g. if they think it's infected or if you're laid off unexpectedly), you would not have a leg to stand on to refuse no matter what personal data or log-ins you might have on it. I had this happen once when a tool I was developing for load testing was generating enough traffic to attract the attention of IT; fortunately all I had on it were a few music files.
It's the company's computer, not yours. End of story.
I find it annoying to haul around and switch between two laptops (especially traveling). Here's what I have done:
I bought an external SSD and a usb 3.1 type-c enclosure for about $120-130 on amazon and use it as a boot disk (hold option while booting). This way I can boot my work laptop into a physically separated OS for personal use. I use whole-disk encryption on that disk via FileVault.
I also symlink my source code dir to a separate volume on the internal SSD drive so that I can access it from this second OS if I need to pull some code over to work on it.
Warning: I recommend testing this with a cheap USB stick before buying the drive because booting from external disks can can be disabled with profiles.
Of course that all depends on the nature of what the company does.
I have a company-issued laptop and I have never opened my personal email or even a non-work browser tab on it. I assume everything is monitored and recorded. Get a 2nd laptop for your personal use.
No.