Laptops with Stickers

I saw laptops like those on hackathons and always sort of assumed they were their personal machines. Kind of surprising to read here that some of those were apparently (company-owned) work laptops.

Startup culture?

My laptop at Amazon was also covered in stickers, although I shied away from the more politically charged ones.

Not really, I work at a big and older company and they will even have stickers around the office(we only need to go to the office 4 or 5 times per year, but can go whenever we please) to put in the laptops.

Not necessarily startup. You can see some laptops with defcon stickers, it used to be very common for infosec auditors to have work laptops full of stickers not that long ago. Although, it is bad practice for read team audits, and some large companies don't like this kind of shenanigans for internal audits, so that may explain why it is less frequent nowadays

When everybody is issued with a dull grey laptop, putting a few stickers on it is a nice way to know which one is yours when there's ten laptops on a meeting table and it can help users feels more responsible of their laptop.

The nastiest/dirtiest laptops I saw were always sticker less.

Not necessarily startup culture, my current assignment (energy company) has a number of teams that all want to do some kind of personal identity and self-promo, so they have stickers made on occasion.

Unfortunately a lot of them are AI generated, which is weird given we have a number of designers in the teams too.

You see this at quite large companies. FAANGs and such.

I used to work for medium/big tech companies (8,000 - 70,000 employees.)

I always had a sticker on my laptop - everybody had the same laptop (or maybe one of two models.) It was a reliable way to quickly identify mine in a big group at a meeting or conference.

Funnily enough, not having stickers for me was an equally (if not more) reliable way to identify my laptop at those types of companies.

I work at a large (>50k employees) company that is in every way the opposite of a start-up. Plenty of people cover their work laptops in stickers. The hardware group that handles replacing old machines has a wall of fame for all the lids with cool stickers.