13 ms·

Why Quit? Because the other company has bigger monitors.

301 points by sefk 14y ago

kprobst 14y ago
Strictly speaking, I would leave for two monitors rather than a big one. Productivity-wise I find that makes all the difference. But the point about the engineering culture is certainly valid.
- endianswap 14y ago
  Yeah, I was trying to decide if I would be happier with bigger monitors (a co-worker bought himself an Apple Cinema display, for example) since I've only got 20 inch monitors. But then I realized I have 3 20 inch monitors on my desk, so that's probably preferable to anything else I could think of.
- mattdeboard 14y ago
  I'm just the opposite. I was offered a couple of 20" monitors but asked for a huge monitor. Do not regret it.
  - jbigelow76 14y ago
    I'm in the one big ass monitor camp too, I've got two 20s right now and one is almost wasted (it's the Outlook, chat client, and music playing holder). I've tried actually utilizing both but my field of vision feels off the whole time because I dont like having the break between the two centered, too much context switching. But to each their own.
  - rdl 14y ago
    I've really gotten into adjustable monitor arms; I have 3 x 24" and a laptop stand, all on dual ergotron arms. Being able to reassign monitors on multiple systems (mba, mbp, desktop linux, system-under-test) is really nice. I'd probably add a core 30" if I didn't already have more 24" than I needed at the time. 30" + 24" portrait (2?) is probably the sweet spot for a single desktop machine + laptop.
  - mgcross 14y ago
    Count me in too. I'm just not a fan of tennis. One 2560x1600 monitor feels much more fluid than tracking my head across two monitors that amount to a 16:5 screen with 3" of deadspace (bezels) running down the middle.
ajross 14y ago
I think the meta-point sort of makes sense. Places that don't skimp on resources which are a comparatively small fraction of salary (monitors, fancy coffee makers, catered food, etc...) are more likely to value their employees. That said: I use a single 15.6" laptop on a stand (or, of course, in my lap) for pretty much everything I do. I find the added productivity of always having everything I work on in front of me in exactly the state I always use it outweighs any benefit of a fancier workstation. I wouldn't know what to do with a 30" monitor.
- jsprinkles 14y ago
  Speak for yourself. In operations, I have far too many graphs and widgets and knick-knacks, and I can really use all the real estate given to me (particularly when in command). I have duals and still don't have enough. At my last job, I even stuck a USB dongle on my iMac for a third, but it ended up being a painful experience and negatively impacted things like Exposé. You can never go too Star Trek when it comes to cool graphs. It's not a pissing contest, either, honest; I genuinely need all of that information in front of me in a crisis.
  - 1qaz2wsx3edc 14y ago
    IMO graphs should be on a separate machine(s)/monitor(s) for all to see & watch, this could clear up space for your own work. While encouraging knowledge to be disseminated. Any critical information you could still keep close, but the less important stuff can be pushed to central monitor(s).
    - jsprinkles 14y ago
      I think it should be both. It's a lot harder to see stuff from a distance. Put it in front of me, please.
  - mkopinsky 14y ago
    I am dying to hear what all your graphs and widgets and knick-knacks are. Maybe post a screenshot with mini-paragraphs of what each thing is and why you genuinely need it in a crisis?
wamatt 14y ago
Agree with the monitors. The email thing less so. A consistent email format, helps people remember and communicate better. Yes it has less of "YOUR" ego imprinted all over it, but surely there are a plenty of other ways to express yourself? Seems a bit petty, and creates admin more work for you sysadmin and his managers. "GodHatesFags@yourcompany.com". See, now you need a policy against that sort of unpleasantness. Becomes more complicated. "Just use common sense" as a policy also has issues, because what is acceptable to some, and "common sense", is not to others. The size of the company, is also relative to the number of policies/guidelines needed. Social acceptability is easier to pull off, in a small group, where the values are easily sub-communicated. That does not scale however.
- earl 14y ago
  A consistent email format is only useful for companies too lazy to set up a directory service in their email clients. And personal names are way easier to remember for people outside the organization.
  - wamatt 14y ago
    Really? Are you seriously making an argument against convenience, by labelling people "lazy"? sigh
    - wyclif 14y ago
      He's not making an argument against convenience, he's making an argument for convenience applied consistently. It's inconvenient for people outside the company to remember your first initial and last name if you can use something else, like your first name or your last name.
      - wamatt 14y ago
        I see. Yeah my bad. Didn't read it properly.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
flavien_bessede 14y ago
The real power is to be able to expense the monitor of your choice.
- jasomill 14y ago
  This is what all companies should do for "knowledge worker" I/O devices, within reason. For some definition of reason, that is, that at least covers my Thunderbolt display and "large" Wacom tablet.
shaggyfrog 14y ago
I had a stint working at a massive corporation. I was given a "recycled" machine (full of crap from the previous user), whatever keyboard and mouse I could scrounge up from empty desks nearby, and two 19" monitors of different brands, one of which suffered from serious burn-in. Oh, and my work environment was filthy when I got there, I didn't have all sorts of access set up, and I had probably the noisiest spot on the floor. These conditions left an indelible negative first impression when I arrived, and things only got worse. It takes an honest commitment by the People in Charge to ensure the best possible work conditions, and that commitment needs to be asserted every day. When you stop caring about the environment in which your developers work, then you've stopped caring. And that lack of care will be apparent the whole way through -- from top-level processes, to architecture, right down to the desks at which people work. At least I had an Aeron chair. So I had that going for me, which is nice.
crazygringo 14y ago
The monitors, I totally understand and agree with. That's about actual productivity. But choosing your own e-mail address? There must be a thousand little details like that in my life, every day, that I have no control over, like the color of my desk, or the sound of a coworker's voice. By all means, try to find a workplace that suits you the best, but if a seemingly tiny detail like that bothers you so much, unless company policy turns your e-mail address into something offensive, I can't help but feel you're going to have a hard time being happy anywhere. Am I the only one who's literally never thought about their corporate e-mail address form before?
- jclulow 14y ago
  It might not be important to you, but I don't think the article is saying that it has to be. I think it's a good yardstick, though, for taking the 'temperature' of the sorts of policies and the kind of work environment you're about to be standing in if you decide to take a job. As someone recently said to me when I asked if their e-mail address was "firstname.lastname@" -- "Please, we're still a startup; firstname@ is fine." It's a part of the corporate culture, no matter how small, and I suspect if you dig deeper you'll easily find other seemingly trivial but illustrative examples of how people think and work in a company.
  - jandrewrogers 14y ago
    In some large Silicon Valley companies, "firstname@company.com" is a badge of honor because it indicates that you were an employee back when the company was small. New employees don't receive that option at some point.
    - bmj 14y ago
      Yep, that's how it works with my employer. Typically, your email address and network ID are setup prior to your first day, which doesn't bother me much since what I got matches what I'm used to using.
  - sefk 14y ago
    Exactly jclulow -- it's a clue. Thanks for explaining.
delightedrobot 14y ago
The email comment makes no sense. If someone is so adamant they need a specific email address, what else will they be unreasonable about? I'm more interested in whether the company does everything possible to make the office a place you never want to leave. The right equipment for every job should be default. Food follows closely after, followed by nontraditional work spaces. Some of my best work is done either standing at a desk or sitting on a couch with my feet up. Flexible schedules also seem more important than an email address.
- metamatt 14y ago
  Well, you shouldn't compromise on any of those if they're important to you. And if you don't care about your username, then great, one less thing to have to worry about. But I think for anyone that does care about their username, it's a sign of respect when the company lets you choose it, and a sign -- not the end-all, but a sign -- of trouble ahead if they can't, and the OP's point is valid. (The thing about large monitors isn't the end-all-be-all way of judging an employer either! These are just litmus tests that give a very quick way of judging whether they have an engineering-focused culture. I'd expect these factors to largely align, but hey, if there's somewhere that gets both these tests wrong but everything else right and is still an awesome place to be an engineer -- more power to them.)
  - sefk 14y ago
    Well said Matt, thanks
jbigelow76 14y ago
I totally get the monitor point, totally disagree with the email point though. Absolutely zero of my personal identity is tied into how company related correspondence are routed to my inbox. If the email thing really is that big a deal let a cookie cutter corporate email address be a constant reminder to you that somebody else owns your time until you build something of your own, and then you can decide email names.
stuff4ben 14y ago
Screw the monitors, as long as I have some good coffee, a filtered water machine, and my desk is close to the bathrooms (see previous two reqs), I'm in heaven. Well that and actually having something worth working for. Greenfield projects are the best, followed by high-profile, high-pressure applications where you directly affect the company's bottom line. Sadly none of these can be found in the corporate jobs I've been working at lately.
njharman 14y ago
I find his domain highly ironic given his views on email addresses. My identity is with my personal email addresses. Company address is ephemeral and "throw-away" over the long haul.
kondro 14y ago
I see lots of different comments here about monitors. I think you're kind of missing the point. The point of the article is that engineers value being trusted and allowed to create the work environment that bests suits them. Whether you prefer 3 x 23" monitors or a single 30" monitor or even a 13" MacBook Air, you should be able to use the tools that make you most efficient (especially if you're being paid $120k+… what's the impact of a $1,000 27" display on the cashflow).
- jandrewrogers 14y ago
  This is exactly it. At my company, the cost of someone's engineering rig ends up being a rounding error. So the prevailing popular setup these days is a loaded Macbook Air or Pro (sometimes with Linux installed instead of OSX) and a 30" monitor. I think the only real restriction is that we do not run Windows, which would be an impedance mismatch and support hassle for what we do (massively parallel real-time analytical databases). Of course, this means people have to support their own system if they run some odd OS flavor but no one seems to mind. Whatever makes people happy. For that matter, we also let everyone pick their own email address as well.
- pm90 14y ago
  I agree. But as it so often happens, engineers love to talk about their personal preference of monitors. I imagine that's because there isn't another place where you can candidly discuss this topic
- Drbble 14y ago
  If it is so valuable to your productivity, why not buy your own kit (outside of security managed OS) and finance it out of the big raise or reduced work hours you need to produce? If your management doesn't reward productivity, it is more a babysitting arrangement than an enterprise, so you should work on your startup in your unproductive time a work.
- ZanderEarth32 14y ago
  Why is being allowed to create a work environment that best suits them given engineers? Wouldn't this improve most anyone's productivity who works in an office? Besides that, isn't it fair that if the engineer gets to hand pick his chair and his lighting levels shouldn't the bus dev, HR or PR person get the same?
jonamato 14y ago
Monitors are nice indeed, but the one infrastructure item that would get me to turn down a job offer is Lotus Notes. I depend entirely too much on email to be able to do my job to saddle myself with that piece of junk. Using Notes is like trying to run a marathon with snowshoes on.
- outside1234 14y ago
  omg - does that still exist?
  - jroll 14y ago
    General motors still runs their entire email system on Lotus Notes. Some people are even still running version 6, which I think is 2 or 3 versions behind...
  - eslachance 14y ago
    I worked tech support last year and yes, there is still a small percentage of people that use Notes in their daily work. I have no idea how they did not get an internal employee revolt yet. I didn't dare ask :|
    - gabriel 14y ago
      I have to use Lotus notes at my work. As a result my team doesn't use email. We pretty much don't communicate in any reliable way and insert all of these strange rules on our tracking system so things don't get lost. Ridiculous.
  - greedo 14y ago
    Yes, I work for a large insurance company, and we're wedded to Notes until death do us part. And it's not just for email, it's for a huge number of custom applications that use the Notes framework.
    - bartonfink 14y ago
      Greedo - it's not in North Carolina, is it?
alan_cx 14y ago
Pah, monitors, blah, blah. What about a comfy chair? I'd go anywhere for a nice chair. ;)
- kzahel 14y ago
  pfft, chairs. what, do you sit down all day long, you slob?
wyclif 14y ago
Some projets Projects.
damoncali 14y ago
Just a thought I'm not sure I actually believe myself: Does catering to every trivial whim (email address? really?) of your employees create a culture of entitled whiners? I've never worked at such a place, so I wouldn't know.
- myelin 14y ago
  I'm guessing it's a hacker status thing. We care a lot about seemingly trivial things, but not nearly as much about other things, that might appear more important. We're easily appeased entitled whiners :)
- jrockway 14y ago
  Yes. But what's the point of spending all that money on employees if they aren't 100% happy?
  - mgkimsal 14y ago
    To get the most work out of them for the least amount of money.
- mquander 14y ago
  It sounds to me like it makes a culture of happy people. If someone wants something that doesn't hurt anyone, and it's super easy to provide them the thing, why wouldn't you do it? Asking for and giving things that fit that description is common sense, not being an entitled whiner.
ef4 14y ago
Those are both good indicators, and at least some companies get them right. I would add a few more that almost no one gets right: does the culture create meaningful chunks of interruption-free time (Paul Graham's "Maker's Schedule")? Do programmers get quiet places to work?
jroseattle 14y ago
For the engineers I've hired onto my team, I insist they be provided the very things that I want as an engineer: - Two big monitors - New dev machine/laptop, running latest bits - A top-of-the-line chair - Some natural light (not to be confused with *natty light*) These are the non-negotiable items, and having taken a few senior mgmt positions, it's now something I state upfront: this is how we roll, no exceptions. There's a second tier, depending on the environment: personal whiteboards. This is a function of the physical space, obviously; but anytime someone has a brilliant idea, I don't want them waving hands in front of me, I want expo markers flying around. Aside from standard company stuff, that's it. And it's across the board -- everyone gets this. Everyone is valued, because your time is valued. I expect a lot from my team, and don't want anything petty getting in the way -- especially a few pieces of hardware and furniture that are negligible compared to the cost of the engineer. It might not be everything in the world, but it sure seems to keep everyone happy because they are seriously productive.
- gnarizard 14y ago
  Natural light can't be emphasized enough. I just moved to a window-less fluorescent fishbowl shared by three analysts/developers, and I've never had so many headaches.
  - rdl 14y ago
    I hate natural light and windows; give me a windowless room where I can set the temperature, light level, etc. exactly, independent of time of day. The first thing after "private offices for anyone who wants them" is "24x7 HVAC adjustable as close to individually as possible"; I have a shared office in an invite-only coworking space which I largely don't use because the HVAC shuts off at 6pm and is on again at 9am, with huge windows -- it's barely ok in the evenings/mornings during the week, but unusable on weekends.
  - deleted 14y ago
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  - pivo 14y ago
    Maybe it's not possible if you're sharing a room, but in the past I was in a similar situation with regard to natural light. I turned off the ceiling fluorescents and brought in incandescent desk and floor lamps. It made the room much more comfortable and got rid of my headaches.
willhsiung 14y ago
I think the monitors thing only matters if it's applied consistently, such as getting the biggest/latest/greatest when starting or when requested by the employee for a work reason. If the company doesn't give that to you in the first place but does when you are pressured to get a project done, that's not valuing you - that's desperation. The previous department head in my company has resorted to something similar and that was a complete turn-off as it was more about his ass being saved than caring for his people.
blcArmadillo 14y ago
I personally like formulated emails. Maybe it's the fact that I really like consistency but it also makes emailing coworkers much easier. I don't want to have to go hunting through a directory to find their custom email.
- groby_b 14y ago
  Really, it's not as big a deal as you'd think. You simply know your coworkers by their e-mail address, not by their name. (Yes, I call people by their handle, and they call me by mine. We get along just fine)
rdl 14y ago
Of all the "big companies" I've seen, Facebook has the best internal IT. A lot of those policies were set by Yishan Wong; basically, if something can be done more efficiently by an individual employee than by using IT, the process is broken. (http://algeri-wong.com/yishan/ http://algeri-wong.com/yishan/) Facebook IT is basically a cache, but if something is faster to get from the Apple Store or whatever, that's how they did it -- not sure how it is done now. It's hilarious how in big companies it takes weeks+ to get things done in IT which could be trivially accomplished with a credit card and web browser, for less money. Yes, there are security policies (which should be enforced in the infrastructure and by user policy, not by end user hardware alone, and it should be carrot vs. stick for common builds), but things like ordering keyboards and chairs shouldn't be bottlenecked.
- Jun8 14y ago
  Thanks for the link, it has great comments, but for me the most important was: "every modern IT organization is actively destroying value in their company", which in the Big Co I work is totally true.
- rwg 14y ago
  If you think corporate IT is dysfunctional, try working at a government agency or a public university. Something as simple as buying a new desktop computer to replace a ten year old, dying computer turns into a multi-week affair where every step of the purchase is stymied by some layer of bureaucracy. (Inevitably, one of those layers of bureaucracy is on vacation this week and won't get around to rejecting your purchase requisition until next Monday.) If your purchase exceeds some magic dollar amount and has to go out for bids, ${DEITY} help you. You might put out an RFP for a toaster and end up with Purchasing selecting a bidder offering a lawnmower because they're a small business, woman-owned business, or minority-owned business, and that fact gave them enough extra points in the selection matrix to beat all of the bidders offering a toaster.
  - rdl 14y ago
    I spent most of 2004-2010 working on government/military (including NATO and Iraqi and Afghan government, which were the worst) IT contracting. For instance, it took me 5 months and a 3-star general's approval needed to make a (trivial) firewall change, between two lobes of a network all at the same accreditation level. It only happened THAT fast because making the change had a measurable impact on trauma care (i.e. it probably saved >1 life).
penetrator 14y ago
it's hard for me to imagine that the first apple computer would be have been created if woz insisted on using a large cinema projector, much less two projectors he hacked a regular tv instead, and that's how apple was born
- varelse 14y ago
  Back in those days, printers were macho 160-column beasts that could spew out 10,000+ lines of code in one continuous folded scroll. I then debugged by taking that enormous scroll of paper to the beach, the park, or somewhere else pleasant and scribbled all over it. While I love 30" monitors, something has been lost in abandoning that method of reviewing code. Just sayin'...
- Drbble 14y ago
  If cinema projectors were bog standard then, there would have been no market for the Apple.
javajosh 14y ago
This post confuses masterful flourishes with substance. And by the way, I don't like big monitors - I get too many degrees of freedom and find it too hard to focus. I have a 27" cinema that I never use with my 13" MBP.
- Drbble 14y ago
  How can you fit a line of Java code on a 13" screen?
andrewkreid 14y ago
Two monitor stories: 1. In my last job I calculated the price of a nice monitor as a percentage of my salary and told my boss that it would only have to make me 0.4% more productive for it to be a good investment. Did I get a new monitor? Nope. 2. A friend of mine works at Google in Sydney and I went to visit. The first thing that struck me as I gazed out across their cube farm (they have a nice office, but it's still a cube farm) was that the OpenGL screensavers on every single desktop were running at a decent framerate, a marked contrast to my workspace, which runs the same screensavers but only 10% have the right video drivers installed :)
benihana 14y ago
Want to know if a company has good engineering culture? Look up the company's engineers' facebook and twitter feeds and see what they're saying. Engineers who are happy tell everyone about it. Big monitors and choosing your email addresses are great; for a couple of weeks. Then after the big monitor honeymoon phase is over and the daily slog begins, the engineers realize that they have a big monitor that buries them in the horrible culture of the company that attracts people based on looks and surface happiness. Two big monitors and nice chairs are byproducts of a culture that is good, not reasons that a culture is good. Find a company where the engineers are happy, where the engineers don't leave, and where the management understands that happiness doesn't mean a couple of monitors or a nice chair. Happiness is having your opinions valued, getting fulfillment out of your work and being able to effect change within the company.
- robryan 14y ago
  Then after you have found that company ask for the equipment you need? Sure the culture is more than just a few monitors, but I think a company not giving you the optimal gear is less likely to have a good culture.
- rmc 14y ago
  The theory behind "2 monitors" is that companies that allow 2 monitors aren't the sort of places which have lots of soul crushing work. It's a proxy for a good company.
  - vonmoltke 14y ago
    Not a very good theory, because I recently left a place with lots of soul-crushing work but where people in the software functional all had two monitors. I was working mostly as a software engineer, but was actually categorized as a systems engineer; I did not have two monitors. They had people in the electrical and test orgs working effectively as software engineers also, and few of them had two. This (dys)functional organization was not at all apparent to an outside observer, no matter how much research they did, without someone on the inside. So, while I would certainly be more favorably inclined towards a company that promised two monitors, choice of dev box, or other things, I would not use such things as a primary or secondary filter on where I want to work.
ww520 14y ago
Actually on a related topic, do people know what's the typical ratio of capital spending vs revenue of a typical software company? Capital spending should include equipments, IT infrastructure, operation infrastructure, etc. I was at one company with 1% cap/revenue ratio and it was horrible. People had to bring in their own big monitors if they wanted a bigger one. Of course the CEO was proud with such low ratio.
pwthornton 14y ago
I'm shocked at how few companies let their knowledge workers pick out their machines. I've been using OS X since 10.1, but I keep going to companies that stick me with Windows, despite the fact that I'm probably 10-20 percent less productive (maybe more when you factor in all the OS X-only software that I'm used to). My last job eventually got me a Macbook Pro, and I'm trying to work on this new employer. I was able to get a big external monitor but only after asking. It's not something that you're asked about when you start. I don't work for a software or engineering company, and I enjoy the work, but I'd really like to be on a machine that really worked well for me and my needs. I really dislike Windows software in particular, and have found some real gems on OS X. Too many companies try to nickle and dime IT spending. Saving a few hundred dollars or so on an employees machine isn't going to do you a lot of good if that means a lot of lost productivity. The problem is that the people at the top often spend more time in meetings than working and only do email, PowerPoint, Word and Excel. They don't quite grasp how a better system could lead to more productivity, because their jobs aren't to produce things. Of course, if you don't understand how your employees produce things, maybe you shouldn't be at the top.
bcee 14y ago
To be honest these days I kind of expect the company to either provide me with a reasonable budget and tell me to go buy what I need, or let me bring in my own hardware. Then I can be sure I'm getting what I need (which is, yes, two 27inch mons and a mb pro)
jack-r-abbit 14y ago
My first work email ever was first initial and last name. It made sense. I liked it. That is what I used when I got my own domain later. It is what I got @gmail. Interestingly, every job I have had since that first has also used the same format. If I was given the chance at my next job to pick my own email address.. it would probably be the same. :)
steve8918 14y ago
Valuing an employee's time is definitely something that should be considered. But even taken a few steps further than "I need another monitor to increase productivity", and you're floating dangerously close to self-entitlement, and simple, pathetic whining. At Yahoo, I distinctly remember a thread on devel-random where one employee, in a single post, complained about things like how ugly the color scheme of the walls were, the fact that buildings in Mercado had too many floors, so when he left work, he has to stop at all the floors, and that the parking lot had flies that would get stuck in his hair gel. He called Yahoo the "worst place in the world to work at" because of this. It was incredibly sickening how ridiculous the email was. The employer-employee relationship is a balance. If it swings too far in one direction where the employees get their ass kissed every day, then you breed self-entitled spoiled brats that are intolerable to work with. If it swings too far towards the employer, you get a dictatorship. I've worked in both environments, and neither of them are any good. But to quit because you think that monitors are a litmus test about the engineering culture is ridiculous and is more of a reflection on you than the engineering culture. If you have a problem, solve it like an adult. It sounds like the employee didn't even mention it to his boss until he left. (It also sounds like the boss didn't bother asking the employee at their 1:1's about what they thought needed changing, or maybe he was just unapproachable.) Maybe it was just an oversight, maybe they didn't have the money, who knows. Life in general is a lot easier if you're flexible and less of a prima donna and go with the flow. To keep quibbling over the minutiae and extrapolate that to mean something more than it is, to me, is more whining than anything else.
- eshvk 14y ago
  I am not so sure that the situation is as simple as that. My perception is that these tiny issues are usually symptoms of an underlying reason why there is no longer (if there ever was) a fit between the company and a person. I think what happens is that once a person consciously or not realizes that this underlying reason has come up, all these tiny things start becoming more and more irritating, until the person explodes.
- gaius 14y ago
  you're floating dangerously close to self-entitlement, and simple, pathetic whining Developers acting like this, and getting away with it, should ring the bubble alarm bells. It's how it was in the 90s too.
malkia 14y ago
Also let the coders name the internal libraries/apps they write. It's their creation, also improves the culture. Generic names are just not good. Even our internal servers are called with strange names, //pictures being the main intranet for the studio :) It's all good...
petercooper 14y ago
As with most things in life, the little things count because the little things show that people care (or, at least, are putting in enough effort to look like they do) and don't think you're just a cog in a machine.
sunkencity 14y ago
I too fall for the big monitor fallacy, I like running an external monitor at high rez. One screen with a web browser and the other with a split terminal vim split in 2-4 panes. But it's really just moat. I could do well with just one terminal and a little better short-term memory. If I work focused and take breaks, I can work with just one terminal window @ fullscreen, control-z for task management and a web browser to switch between. Just look at zedshaw. He works with a couple of junk linux laptops and a white macbook, and gets the shit done. The hardware doesn't matter that much, especially if you're doing your work in the terminal most any computer is fast enough. I suspect though, that when it comes to guitars he has a little more equipment jones. I used to work on a white macbook 1:st gen for years, but I bought a new mbp 15" a couple of years ago so that I could run vmware and not have the machine melt every time there was flash on a webpage. In short, equipment doesn't matter that much (unless you're running an IDE), it's more important to take breaks and stay focused.
- mahyarm 14y ago
  That really does depend on your code base. If you have some large 1 million line C++ codebase that your computer fails to index half the time and compiles that take 20 minutes minimum; you need the 27" resolution to view all the panes of a running program at the same time; a better machine and larger screens are very useful.
- pavelkaroukin 14y ago
  This article wasn't about equipment. It was about external signs about culture. You can use whatever you love, be it iPad, old MB or Dell workstation with Windows on it. Whatever get job done. But if company not willing spend money (quite little in the long run) on equipment - this is a sign that this place is bad for engineers since management value engineers less than equipment.
lmm 14y ago
I'm not personally invested in my work email address, but my last employer insisted I use their format for my IRC nick. That was unpleasant.
codeonfire 14y ago
This has always been a tell for what kind of management runs a software company. If you can't get a 24" monitor because the guy in charge has a 24 and has to have a 30 before anyone else can have a 24, time to run away.
- Limes102 14y ago
  Haha, yeah. That happened to me.
deepGem 14y ago
Reminds me of the days at the Sun offices in Santa Clara back in 2004. One personal office, two top of the line Sun workstations with 21 inch monitors, an additional windows PC if required. One big whiteboard and two phones. Damn, get into your office, shut the door and get on with your work. It felt like your own personal control room :).
michael_miller 14y ago
As a corollary, I've found that salary is a good indicator of how good a company's culture is. Not because of the actual money of course (money doesn't buy happiness, blah blah blah), but because a company that pays its engineers more generally values its engineers more. Most of the "hip" companies with good culture (FB, Google, Palantir) pay quite well, whereas other companies associated with a bad culture (which I will not name) tend to pay poorly. Not always true, of course, but a good heuristic.
- Drbble 14y ago
  And facebook sits engineers at grand long tables people complain about.
dsirijus 14y ago
At my place, you get name.surname@mycompany.com and can have as many aliases as you want, I don't care - I'll always send you mail to name.surname@mycompany.com. How is it NOT geeky to have local mail parts in friggin' order? Also, even if I had money to provide some hardware to people working for me, I'd call them whining b....s they are. We'll organically upgrade on neccesity and keep it lean at all times.
- mh- 14y ago
  congrats, you found the most effective way to ensure that you only hire candidates who couldn't get on at more enjoyable places to work.
  - dsirijus 14y ago
    No, I attract hard working, no nonsense people who take joy in getting things done with least amount of friction, and who don't need masseuse to write code.
    - illumen 14y ago
      Smart working people can just go elsewhere. The hardworking people can make use of recycled computers scavenged off the street. If you can't wait 10 minutes for the test suite to run, things to compile or files to finish transferring - then you're just a wining bitch. Using old hard drives is fine, an SSD will just make the work easier. Work should be hard, and painful - otherwise it's just play. Why would you want to see multiple views of your data, when you can just flip between windows all the time and scroll a lot?
    - jiggy2011 14y ago
      You don't need chairs either, or central heating or even colour screens for that matter.
    - chrisbennet 14y ago
      Think of all the joy they'd have, less friction and money saved if they got rid of their manager. ;-)
sgt 14y ago
I am productive using my 15 inch Macbook Pro. They offered me a Samsung 23 inch monitor but the quality was poorer than my MBP's screen, and it looked cheap and not very elegant to share the same deskspace.
ntoshev 14y ago
Apparently this site is using CloudFlare, and it's failing: DNS Resolution Error You've requested a page on a website (sef.kloninger.com) that is on the CloudFlare network. Unfortunately, CloudFlare is currently unable to resolve your requested domain (sef.kloninger.com). There are two potential causes of this: Most likely: if the owner just signed up for CloudFlare it can take a few minutes for the website's information to be distributed to our global network. Check back in about 5 minutes and the site should be up and running and enjoying all the benefits of CloudFlare. Less likely: something is wrong with this site's configuration. Usually this happens when accounts have been signed up with a partner organization (e.g., a hosting provider) and the provider's DNS fails.
nicholassmith 14y ago
Hm, I think a few people have missed the point of the post by the 'omg how self-entitled' posts I've just scanned through. This isn't just about getting bigger monitors, or a fancy email or a dozen other things, it's about companies that don't understand the development environment that works best is whatever the developer needs. Your company makes software? The developers are their biggest asset. Plus given a blank cheque most of us wouldn't go wild, we understand what we need and skip the rest.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
Joeboy 14y ago
Choose your own email address? It can take weeks of hassling here to get any email address set up here. I consider it a luxury to be able to receive email, clone our git repositories or connect to webservices I'm coding for. On the plus side I've got quite good at setting up ssh tunnels.
hackermom 14y ago
[detached] melissa@tellus$ whoami melissa Last login: Fri May 18 09:29:53 on ttys002 MelBook:~ melissa$ whoami melissa phew!
jiggy2011 14y ago
2 large monitors? really? How very 2004, I thought all the rockstar programmers these days did everything from starbucks on an 11" Macbook air or through an SSH session from their iPad!
- vidarh 14y ago
  Except at Github, apparently: http://instagr.am/p/Kt05fpp2OL/ http://instagr.am/p/Kt05fpp2OL/
hessenwolf 14y ago
As somebody squeezing my eyes into a 19 inch with shitty resolution, I see where you are coming from. Also, I don't have admin access to my computer. I'm forcibly handicapped.
ticks 14y ago
If someone's complaining about the size of a monitor as a reason for leaving then there's a good chance that it isn't the monitors! People don't like burning bridges when they leave a job, so they are highly unlikely to say the real reason - especially when the person that's asking for the reason is the actual problem.
- sethg 14y ago
  Yeah, the monitor isn’t the reason; the monitor is a symptom. Best Buy is selling 27" monitors for about $300 and 30" monitors for about $1,500. As a percentage of a full-time developer’s salary, depreciated over three years, $600 is pocket change and even $3,000 is defensible. So if a company is nickel-and-diming its developers over this kind of thing, what does that say about the overall attitude of the management?
varelse 14y ago
Google is the only employer that ever offered me a 30" monitor from day one. Google was also the absolute worst employer of my professional career. I've gone into why on other threads - just take it as a given that Google and I really really clashed culturally - and the best thing to do was to leave as fast as I possibly could. That said, I can certainly see a manager who asks upfront what I need to be productive as a good sign and an absolute refusal to consider such needs as a bad one.
yashchandra 14y ago
Amen to Dual Monitors
MattRogish 14y ago
We have an unlimited budget for hardware. You want three monitors? You got it. A desktop and a laptop? Sold. The caveat of course, is be a reasonable adult and don't ask for a $50,000 gold-plated MacBook or something. As long as you can get more incremental value out of the hardware than it costs for us to get it for you, it's yours. I think it all comes down to trust - as the article states, it's not about bigger monitors but the company trusting you to do the right thing.
joshu 14y ago
Is it just me or is too many monitors distracting? I find that I have cut down to just one monitor at both work and home. I was using one monitor for work and one monitor for communication. I realized it was easier just to quit the chat apps. (Mind you, at the company I run, employees get whatever they want, hardware-wise. Everyone seems to have settled on the 27" apple monitor + the laptop display.)

301 points by sefk 14y ago

Strictly speaking, I would leave for two monitors rather than a big one. Productivity-wise I find that makes all the difference. But the point about the engineering culture is certainly valid.

endianswap 14y ago
Yeah, I was trying to decide if I would be happier with bigger monitors (a co-worker bought himself an Apple Cinema display, for example) since I've only got 20 inch monitors. But then I realized I have 3 20 inch monitors on my desk, so that's probably preferable to anything else I could think of.
mattdeboard 14y ago
I'm just the opposite. I was offered a couple of 20" monitors but asked for a huge monitor. Do not regret it.
- jbigelow76 14y ago
  I'm in the one big ass monitor camp too, I've got two 20s right now and one is almost wasted (it's the Outlook, chat client, and music playing holder). I've tried actually utilizing both but my field of vision feels off the whole time because I dont like having the break between the two centered, too much context switching. But to each their own.
- rdl 14y ago
  I've really gotten into adjustable monitor arms; I have 3 x 24" and a laptop stand, all on dual ergotron arms. Being able to reassign monitors on multiple systems (mba, mbp, desktop linux, system-under-test) is really nice. I'd probably add a core 30" if I didn't already have more 24" than I needed at the time. 30" + 24" portrait (2?) is probably the sweet spot for a single desktop machine + laptop.
- mgcross 14y ago
  Count me in too. I'm just not a fan of tennis. One 2560x1600 monitor feels much more fluid than tracking my head across two monitors that amount to a 16:5 screen with 3" of deadspace (bezels) running down the middle.

ajross 14y ago

I think the meta-point sort of makes sense. Places that don't skimp on resources which are a comparatively small fraction of salary (monitors, fancy coffee makers, catered food, etc...) are more likely to value their employees. That said: I use a single 15.6" laptop on a stand (or, of course, in my lap) for pretty much everything I do. I find the added productivity of always having everything I work on in front of me in exactly the state I always use it outweighs any benefit of a fancier workstation. I wouldn't know what to do with a 30" monitor.

jsprinkles 14y ago
Speak for yourself. In operations, I have far too many graphs and widgets and knick-knacks, and I can really use all the real estate given to me (particularly when in command). I have duals and still don't have enough. At my last job, I even stuck a USB dongle on my iMac for a third, but it ended up being a painful experience and negatively impacted things like Exposé. You can never go too Star Trek when it comes to cool graphs. It's not a pissing contest, either, honest; I genuinely need all of that information in front of me in a crisis.
- 1qaz2wsx3edc 14y ago
  IMO graphs should be on a separate machine(s)/monitor(s) for all to see & watch, this could clear up space for your own work. While encouraging knowledge to be disseminated. Any critical information you could still keep close, but the less important stuff can be pushed to central monitor(s).
  - jsprinkles 14y ago
    I think it should be both. It's a lot harder to see stuff from a distance. Put it in front of me, please.
- mkopinsky 14y ago
  I am dying to hear what all your graphs and widgets and knick-knacks are. Maybe post a screenshot with mini-paragraphs of what each thing is and why you genuinely need it in a crisis?

wamatt 14y ago

Agree with the monitors. The email thing less so. A consistent email format, helps people remember and communicate better. Yes it has less of "YOUR" ego imprinted all over it, but surely there are a plenty of other ways to express yourself? Seems a bit petty, and creates admin more work for you sysadmin and his managers. "GodHatesFags@yourcompany.com". See, now you need a policy against that sort of unpleasantness. Becomes more complicated. "Just use common sense" as a policy also has issues, because what is acceptable to some, and "common sense", is not to others. The size of the company, is also relative to the number of policies/guidelines needed. Social acceptability is easier to pull off, in a small group, where the values are easily sub-communicated. That does not scale however.

earl 14y ago
A consistent email format is only useful for companies too lazy to set up a directory service in their email clients. And personal names are way easier to remember for people outside the organization.
- wamatt 14y ago
  Really? Are you seriously making an argument against convenience, by labelling people "lazy"? sigh
  - wyclif 14y ago
    He's not making an argument against convenience, he's making an argument for convenience applied consistently. It's inconvenient for people outside the company to remember your first initial and last name if you can use something else, like your first name or your last name.
    - wamatt 14y ago
      I see. Yeah my bad. Didn't read it properly.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

flavien_bessede 14y ago

The real power is to be able to expense the monitor of your choice.

jasomill 14y ago
This is what all companies should do for "knowledge worker" I/O devices, within reason. For some definition of reason, that is, that at least covers my Thunderbolt display and "large" Wacom tablet.

shaggyfrog 14y ago

I had a stint working at a massive corporation. I was given a "recycled" machine (full of crap from the previous user), whatever keyboard and mouse I could scrounge up from empty desks nearby, and two 19" monitors of different brands, one of which suffered from serious burn-in. Oh, and my work environment was filthy when I got there, I didn't have all sorts of access set up, and I had probably the noisiest spot on the floor. These conditions left an indelible negative first impression when I arrived, and things only got worse. It takes an honest commitment by the People in Charge to ensure the best possible work conditions, and that commitment needs to be asserted every day. When you stop caring about the environment in which your developers work, then you've stopped caring. And that lack of care will be apparent the whole way through -- from top-level processes, to architecture, right down to the desks at which people work. At least I had an Aeron chair. So I had that going for me, which is nice.

crazygringo 14y ago

The monitors, I totally understand and agree with. That's about actual productivity. But choosing your own e-mail address? There must be a thousand little details like that in my life, every day, that I have no control over, like the color of my desk, or the sound of a coworker's voice. By all means, try to find a workplace that suits you the best, but if a seemingly tiny detail like that bothers you so much, unless company policy turns your e-mail address into something offensive, I can't help but feel you're going to have a hard time being happy anywhere. Am I the only one who's literally never thought about their corporate e-mail address form before?

jclulow 14y ago
It might not be important to you, but I don't think the article is saying that it has to be. I think it's a good yardstick, though, for taking the 'temperature' of the sorts of policies and the kind of work environment you're about to be standing in if you decide to take a job. As someone recently said to me when I asked if their e-mail address was "firstname.lastname@" -- "Please, we're still a startup; firstname@ is fine." It's a part of the corporate culture, no matter how small, and I suspect if you dig deeper you'll easily find other seemingly trivial but illustrative examples of how people think and work in a company.
- jandrewrogers 14y ago
  In some large Silicon Valley companies, "firstname@company.com" is a badge of honor because it indicates that you were an employee back when the company was small. New employees don't receive that option at some point.
  - bmj 14y ago
    Yep, that's how it works with my employer. Typically, your email address and network ID are setup prior to your first day, which doesn't bother me much since what I got matches what I'm used to using.
- sefk 14y ago
  Exactly jclulow -- it's a clue. Thanks for explaining.

delightedrobot 14y ago

The email comment makes no sense. If someone is so adamant they need a specific email address, what else will they be unreasonable about? I'm more interested in whether the company does everything possible to make the office a place you never want to leave. The right equipment for every job should be default. Food follows closely after, followed by nontraditional work spaces. Some of my best work is done either standing at a desk or sitting on a couch with my feet up. Flexible schedules also seem more important than an email address.

metamatt 14y ago
Well, you shouldn't compromise on any of those if they're important to you. And if you don't care about your username, then great, one less thing to have to worry about. But I think for anyone that does care about their username, it's a sign of respect when the company lets you choose it, and a sign -- not the end-all, but a sign -- of trouble ahead if they can't, and the OP's point is valid. (The thing about large monitors isn't the end-all-be-all way of judging an employer either! These are just litmus tests that give a very quick way of judging whether they have an engineering-focused culture. I'd expect these factors to largely align, but hey, if there's somewhere that gets both these tests wrong but everything else right and is still an awesome place to be an engineer -- more power to them.)
- sefk 14y ago
  Well said Matt, thanks

jbigelow76 14y ago

I totally get the monitor point, totally disagree with the email point though. Absolutely zero of my personal identity is tied into how company related correspondence are routed to my inbox. If the email thing really is that big a deal let a cookie cutter corporate email address be a constant reminder to you that somebody else owns your time until you build something of your own, and then you can decide email names.

stuff4ben 14y ago

Screw the monitors, as long as I have some good coffee, a filtered water machine, and my desk is close to the bathrooms (see previous two reqs), I'm in heaven. Well that and actually having something worth working for. Greenfield projects are the best, followed by high-profile, high-pressure applications where you directly affect the company's bottom line. Sadly none of these can be found in the corporate jobs I've been working at lately.

njharman 14y ago

I find his domain highly ironic given his views on email addresses. My identity is with my personal email addresses. Company address is ephemeral and "throw-away" over the long haul.

kondro 14y ago

I see lots of different comments here about monitors. I think you're kind of missing the point. The point of the article is that engineers value being trusted and allowed to create the work environment that bests suits them. Whether you prefer 3 x 23" monitors or a single 30" monitor or even a 13" MacBook Air, you should be able to use the tools that make you most efficient (especially if you're being paid $120k+… what's the impact of a $1,000 27" display on the cashflow).

jandrewrogers 14y ago
This is exactly it. At my company, the cost of someone's engineering rig ends up being a rounding error. So the prevailing popular setup these days is a loaded Macbook Air or Pro (sometimes with Linux installed instead of OSX) and a 30" monitor. I think the only real restriction is that we do not run Windows, which would be an impedance mismatch and support hassle for what we do (massively parallel real-time analytical databases). Of course, this means people have to support their own system if they run some odd OS flavor but no one seems to mind. Whatever makes people happy. For that matter, we also let everyone pick their own email address as well.
pm90 14y ago
I agree. But as it so often happens, engineers love to talk about their personal preference of monitors. I imagine that's because there isn't another place where you can candidly discuss this topic
Drbble 14y ago
If it is so valuable to your productivity, why not buy your own kit (outside of security managed OS) and finance it out of the big raise or reduced work hours you need to produce? If your management doesn't reward productivity, it is more a babysitting arrangement than an enterprise, so you should work on your startup in your unproductive time a work.
ZanderEarth32 14y ago
Why is being allowed to create a work environment that best suits them given engineers? Wouldn't this improve most anyone's productivity who works in an office? Besides that, isn't it fair that if the engineer gets to hand pick his chair and his lighting levels shouldn't the bus dev, HR or PR person get the same?

jonamato 14y ago

Monitors are nice indeed, but the one infrastructure item that would get me to turn down a job offer is Lotus Notes. I depend entirely too much on email to be able to do my job to saddle myself with that piece of junk. Using Notes is like trying to run a marathon with snowshoes on.

outside1234 14y ago
omg - does that still exist?
- jroll 14y ago
  General motors still runs their entire email system on Lotus Notes. Some people are even still running version 6, which I think is 2 or 3 versions behind...
- eslachance 14y ago
  I worked tech support last year and yes, there is still a small percentage of people that use Notes in their daily work. I have no idea how they did not get an internal employee revolt yet. I didn't dare ask :|
  - gabriel 14y ago
    I have to use Lotus notes at my work. As a result my team doesn't use email. We pretty much don't communicate in any reliable way and insert all of these strange rules on our tracking system so things don't get lost. Ridiculous.
- greedo 14y ago
  Yes, I work for a large insurance company, and we're wedded to Notes until death do us part. And it's not just for email, it's for a huge number of custom applications that use the Notes framework.
  - bartonfink 14y ago
    Greedo - it's not in North Carolina, is it?

alan_cx 14y ago

Pah, monitors, blah, blah. What about a comfy chair? I'd go anywhere for a nice chair. ;)

kzahel 14y ago
pfft, chairs. what, do you sit down all day long, you slob?

wyclif 14y ago

Some projets Projects.

damoncali 14y ago

Just a thought I'm not sure I actually believe myself: Does catering to every trivial whim (email address? really?) of your employees create a culture of entitled whiners? I've never worked at such a place, so I wouldn't know.

myelin 14y ago
I'm guessing it's a hacker status thing. We care a lot about seemingly trivial things, but not nearly as much about other things, that might appear more important. We're easily appeased entitled whiners :)
jrockway 14y ago
Yes. But what's the point of spending all that money on employees if they aren't 100% happy?
- mgkimsal 14y ago
  To get the most work out of them for the least amount of money.
mquander 14y ago
It sounds to me like it makes a culture of happy people. If someone wants something that doesn't hurt anyone, and it's super easy to provide them the thing, why wouldn't you do it? Asking for and giving things that fit that description is common sense, not being an entitled whiner.

ef4 14y ago

Those are both good indicators, and at least some companies get them right. I would add a few more that almost no one gets right: does the culture create meaningful chunks of interruption-free time (Paul Graham's "Maker's Schedule")? Do programmers get quiet places to work?

jroseattle 14y ago

For the engineers I've hired onto my team, I insist they be provided the very things that I want as an engineer: - Two big monitors - New dev machine/laptop, running latest bits - A top-of-the-line chair - Some natural light (not to be confused with *natty light*) These are the non-negotiable items, and having taken a few senior mgmt positions, it's now something I state upfront: this is how we roll, no exceptions. There's a second tier, depending on the environment: personal whiteboards. This is a function of the physical space, obviously; but anytime someone has a brilliant idea, I don't want them waving hands in front of me, I want expo markers flying around. Aside from standard company stuff, that's it. And it's across the board -- everyone gets this. Everyone is valued, because your time is valued. I expect a lot from my team, and don't want anything petty getting in the way -- especially a few pieces of hardware and furniture that are negligible compared to the cost of the engineer. It might not be everything in the world, but it sure seems to keep everyone happy because they are seriously productive.

gnarizard 14y ago
Natural light can't be emphasized enough. I just moved to a window-less fluorescent fishbowl shared by three analysts/developers, and I've never had so many headaches.
- rdl 14y ago
  I hate natural light and windows; give me a windowless room where I can set the temperature, light level, etc. exactly, independent of time of day. The first thing after "private offices for anyone who wants them" is "24x7 HVAC adjustable as close to individually as possible"; I have a shared office in an invite-only coworking space which I largely don't use because the HVAC shuts off at 6pm and is on again at 9am, with huge windows -- it's barely ok in the evenings/mornings during the week, but unusable on weekends.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- pivo 14y ago
  Maybe it's not possible if you're sharing a room, but in the past I was in a similar situation with regard to natural light. I turned off the ceiling fluorescents and brought in incandescent desk and floor lamps. It made the room much more comfortable and got rid of my headaches.

willhsiung 14y ago

I think the monitors thing only matters if it's applied consistently, such as getting the biggest/latest/greatest when starting or when requested by the employee for a work reason. If the company doesn't give that to you in the first place but does when you are pressured to get a project done, that's not valuing you - that's desperation. The previous department head in my company has resorted to something similar and that was a complete turn-off as it was more about his ass being saved than caring for his people.

blcArmadillo 14y ago

I personally like formulated emails. Maybe it's the fact that I really like consistency but it also makes emailing coworkers much easier. I don't want to have to go hunting through a directory to find their custom email.

groby_b 14y ago
Really, it's not as big a deal as you'd think. You simply know your coworkers by their e-mail address, not by their name. (Yes, I call people by their handle, and they call me by mine. We get along just fine)

rdl 14y ago

Of all the "big companies" I've seen, Facebook has the best internal IT. A lot of those policies were set by Yishan Wong; basically, if something can be done more efficiently by an individual employee than by using IT, the process is broken. (http://algeri-wong.com/yishan/ http://algeri-wong.com/yishan/) Facebook IT is basically a cache, but if something is faster to get from the Apple Store or whatever, that's how they did it -- not sure how it is done now. It's hilarious how in big companies it takes weeks+ to get things done in IT which could be trivially accomplished with a credit card and web browser, for less money. Yes, there are security policies (which should be enforced in the infrastructure and by user policy, not by end user hardware alone, and it should be carrot vs. stick for common builds), but things like ordering keyboards and chairs shouldn't be bottlenecked.

Jun8 14y ago
Thanks for the link, it has great comments, but for me the most important was: "every modern IT organization is actively destroying value in their company", which in the Big Co I work is totally true.
rwg 14y ago
If you think corporate IT is dysfunctional, try working at a government agency or a public university. Something as simple as buying a new desktop computer to replace a ten year old, dying computer turns into a multi-week affair where every step of the purchase is stymied by some layer of bureaucracy. (Inevitably, one of those layers of bureaucracy is on vacation this week and won't get around to rejecting your purchase requisition until next Monday.) If your purchase exceeds some magic dollar amount and has to go out for bids, ${DEITY} help you. You might put out an RFP for a toaster and end up with Purchasing selecting a bidder offering a lawnmower because they're a small business, woman-owned business, or minority-owned business, and that fact gave them enough extra points in the selection matrix to beat all of the bidders offering a toaster.
- rdl 14y ago
  I spent most of 2004-2010 working on government/military (including NATO and Iraqi and Afghan government, which were the worst) IT contracting. For instance, it took me 5 months and a 3-star general's approval needed to make a (trivial) firewall change, between two lobes of a network all at the same accreditation level. It only happened THAT fast because making the change had a measurable impact on trauma care (i.e. it probably saved >1 life).

penetrator 14y ago

it's hard for me to imagine that the first apple computer would be have been created if woz insisted on using a large cinema projector, much less two projectors he hacked a regular tv instead, and that's how apple was born

varelse 14y ago
Back in those days, printers were macho 160-column beasts that could spew out 10,000+ lines of code in one continuous folded scroll. I then debugged by taking that enormous scroll of paper to the beach, the park, or somewhere else pleasant and scribbled all over it. While I love 30" monitors, something has been lost in abandoning that method of reviewing code. Just sayin'...
Drbble 14y ago
If cinema projectors were bog standard then, there would have been no market for the Apple.

javajosh 14y ago

This post confuses masterful flourishes with substance. And by the way, I don't like big monitors - I get too many degrees of freedom and find it too hard to focus. I have a 27" cinema that I never use with my 13" MBP.

Drbble 14y ago
How can you fit a line of Java code on a 13" screen?

andrewkreid 14y ago

Two monitor stories: 1. In my last job I calculated the price of a nice monitor as a percentage of my salary and told my boss that it would only have to make me 0.4% more productive for it to be a good investment. Did I get a new monitor? Nope. 2. A friend of mine works at Google in Sydney and I went to visit. The first thing that struck me as I gazed out across their cube farm (they have a nice office, but it's still a cube farm) was that the OpenGL screensavers on every single desktop were running at a decent framerate, a marked contrast to my workspace, which runs the same screensavers but only 10% have the right video drivers installed :)

benihana 14y ago

Want to know if a company has good engineering culture? Look up the company's engineers' facebook and twitter feeds and see what they're saying. Engineers who are happy tell everyone about it. Big monitors and choosing your email addresses are great; for a couple of weeks. Then after the big monitor honeymoon phase is over and the daily slog begins, the engineers realize that they have a big monitor that buries them in the horrible culture of the company that attracts people based on looks and surface happiness. Two big monitors and nice chairs are byproducts of a culture that is good, not reasons that a culture is good. Find a company where the engineers are happy, where the engineers don't leave, and where the management understands that happiness doesn't mean a couple of monitors or a nice chair. Happiness is having your opinions valued, getting fulfillment out of your work and being able to effect change within the company.

robryan 14y ago
Then after you have found that company ask for the equipment you need? Sure the culture is more than just a few monitors, but I think a company not giving you the optimal gear is less likely to have a good culture.
rmc 14y ago
The theory behind "2 monitors" is that companies that allow 2 monitors aren't the sort of places which have lots of soul crushing work. It's a proxy for a good company.
- vonmoltke 14y ago
  Not a very good theory, because I recently left a place with lots of soul-crushing work but where people in the software functional all had two monitors. I was working mostly as a software engineer, but was actually categorized as a systems engineer; I did not have two monitors. They had people in the electrical and test orgs working effectively as software engineers also, and few of them had two. This (dys)functional organization was not at all apparent to an outside observer, no matter how much research they did, without someone on the inside. So, while I would certainly be more favorably inclined towards a company that promised two monitors, choice of dev box, or other things, I would not use such things as a primary or secondary filter on where I want to work.

ww520 14y ago

Actually on a related topic, do people know what's the typical ratio of capital spending vs revenue of a typical software company? Capital spending should include equipments, IT infrastructure, operation infrastructure, etc. I was at one company with 1% cap/revenue ratio and it was horrible. People had to bring in their own big monitors if they wanted a bigger one. Of course the CEO was proud with such low ratio.

pwthornton 14y ago

I'm shocked at how few companies let their knowledge workers pick out their machines. I've been using OS X since 10.1, but I keep going to companies that stick me with Windows, despite the fact that I'm probably 10-20 percent less productive (maybe more when you factor in all the OS X-only software that I'm used to). My last job eventually got me a Macbook Pro, and I'm trying to work on this new employer. I was able to get a big external monitor but only after asking. It's not something that you're asked about when you start. I don't work for a software or engineering company, and I enjoy the work, but I'd really like to be on a machine that really worked well for me and my needs. I really dislike Windows software in particular, and have found some real gems on OS X. Too many companies try to nickle and dime IT spending. Saving a few hundred dollars or so on an employees machine isn't going to do you a lot of good if that means a lot of lost productivity. The problem is that the people at the top often spend more time in meetings than working and only do email, PowerPoint, Word and Excel. They don't quite grasp how a better system could lead to more productivity, because their jobs aren't to produce things. Of course, if you don't understand how your employees produce things, maybe you shouldn't be at the top.

bcee 14y ago

To be honest these days I kind of expect the company to either provide me with a reasonable budget and tell me to go buy what I need, or let me bring in my own hardware. Then I can be sure I'm getting what I need (which is, yes, two 27inch mons and a mb pro)

jack-r-abbit 14y ago

My first work email ever was first initial and last name. It made sense. I liked it. That is what I used when I got my own domain later. It is what I got @gmail. Interestingly, every job I have had since that first has also used the same format. If I was given the chance at my next job to pick my own email address.. it would probably be the same. :)

steve8918 14y ago

Valuing an employee's time is definitely something that should be considered. But even taken a few steps further than "I need another monitor to increase productivity", and you're floating dangerously close to self-entitlement, and simple, pathetic whining. At Yahoo, I distinctly remember a thread on devel-random where one employee, in a single post, complained about things like how ugly the color scheme of the walls were, the fact that buildings in Mercado had too many floors, so when he left work, he has to stop at all the floors, and that the parking lot had flies that would get stuck in his hair gel. He called Yahoo the "worst place in the world to work at" because of this. It was incredibly sickening how ridiculous the email was. The employer-employee relationship is a balance. If it swings too far in one direction where the employees get their ass kissed every day, then you breed self-entitled spoiled brats that are intolerable to work with. If it swings too far towards the employer, you get a dictatorship. I've worked in both environments, and neither of them are any good. But to quit because you think that monitors are a litmus test about the engineering culture is ridiculous and is more of a reflection on you than the engineering culture. If you have a problem, solve it like an adult. It sounds like the employee didn't even mention it to his boss until he left. (It also sounds like the boss didn't bother asking the employee at their 1:1's about what they thought needed changing, or maybe he was just unapproachable.) Maybe it was just an oversight, maybe they didn't have the money, who knows. Life in general is a lot easier if you're flexible and less of a prima donna and go with the flow. To keep quibbling over the minutiae and extrapolate that to mean something more than it is, to me, is more whining than anything else.

eshvk 14y ago
I am not so sure that the situation is as simple as that. My perception is that these tiny issues are usually symptoms of an underlying reason why there is no longer (if there ever was) a fit between the company and a person. I think what happens is that once a person consciously or not realizes that this underlying reason has come up, all these tiny things start becoming more and more irritating, until the person explodes.
gaius 14y ago
you're floating dangerously close to self-entitlement, and simple, pathetic whining Developers acting like this, and getting away with it, should ring the bubble alarm bells. It's how it was in the 90s too.

malkia 14y ago

Also let the coders name the internal libraries/apps they write. It's their creation, also improves the culture. Generic names are just not good. Even our internal servers are called with strange names, //pictures being the main intranet for the studio :) It's all good...

petercooper 14y ago

As with most things in life, the little things count because the little things show that people care (or, at least, are putting in enough effort to look like they do) and don't think you're just a cog in a machine.

sunkencity 14y ago

I too fall for the big monitor fallacy, I like running an external monitor at high rez. One screen with a web browser and the other with a split terminal vim split in 2-4 panes. But it's really just moat. I could do well with just one terminal and a little better short-term memory. If I work focused and take breaks, I can work with just one terminal window @ fullscreen, control-z for task management and a web browser to switch between. Just look at zedshaw. He works with a couple of junk linux laptops and a white macbook, and gets the shit done. The hardware doesn't matter that much, especially if you're doing your work in the terminal most any computer is fast enough. I suspect though, that when it comes to guitars he has a little more equipment jones. I used to work on a white macbook 1:st gen for years, but I bought a new mbp 15" a couple of years ago so that I could run vmware and not have the machine melt every time there was flash on a webpage. In short, equipment doesn't matter that much (unless you're running an IDE), it's more important to take breaks and stay focused.

mahyarm 14y ago
That really does depend on your code base. If you have some large 1 million line C++ codebase that your computer fails to index half the time and compiles that take 20 minutes minimum; you need the 27" resolution to view all the panes of a running program at the same time; a better machine and larger screens are very useful.
pavelkaroukin 14y ago
This article wasn't about equipment. It was about external signs about culture. You can use whatever you love, be it iPad, old MB or Dell workstation with Windows on it. Whatever get job done. But if company not willing spend money (quite little in the long run) on equipment - this is a sign that this place is bad for engineers since management value engineers less than equipment.

lmm 14y ago

I'm not personally invested in my work email address, but my last employer insisted I use their format for my IRC nick. That was unpleasant.

codeonfire 14y ago

This has always been a tell for what kind of management runs a software company. If you can't get a 24" monitor because the guy in charge has a 24 and has to have a 30 before anyone else can have a 24, time to run away.

Limes102 14y ago
Haha, yeah. That happened to me.

deepGem 14y ago

Reminds me of the days at the Sun offices in Santa Clara back in 2004. One personal office, two top of the line Sun workstations with 21 inch monitors, an additional windows PC if required. One big whiteboard and two phones. Damn, get into your office, shut the door and get on with your work. It felt like your own personal control room :).

michael_miller 14y ago

As a corollary, I've found that salary is a good indicator of how good a company's culture is. Not because of the actual money of course (money doesn't buy happiness, blah blah blah), but because a company that pays its engineers more generally values its engineers more. Most of the "hip" companies with good culture (FB, Google, Palantir) pay quite well, whereas other companies associated with a bad culture (which I will not name) tend to pay poorly. Not always true, of course, but a good heuristic.

Drbble 14y ago
And facebook sits engineers at grand long tables people complain about.

dsirijus 14y ago

At my place, you get name.surname@mycompany.com and can have as many aliases as you want, I don't care - I'll always send you mail to name.surname@mycompany.com. How is it NOT geeky to have local mail parts in friggin' order? Also, even if I had money to provide some hardware to people working for me, I'd call them whining b....s they are. We'll organically upgrade on neccesity and keep it lean at all times.

mh- 14y ago
congrats, you found the most effective way to ensure that you only hire candidates who couldn't get on at more enjoyable places to work.
- dsirijus 14y ago
  No, I attract hard working, no nonsense people who take joy in getting things done with least amount of friction, and who don't need masseuse to write code.
  - illumen 14y ago
    Smart working people can just go elsewhere. The hardworking people can make use of recycled computers scavenged off the street. If you can't wait 10 minutes for the test suite to run, things to compile or files to finish transferring - then you're just a wining bitch. Using old hard drives is fine, an SSD will just make the work easier. Work should be hard, and painful - otherwise it's just play. Why would you want to see multiple views of your data, when you can just flip between windows all the time and scroll a lot?
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    You don't need chairs either, or central heating or even colour screens for that matter.
  - chrisbennet 14y ago
    Think of all the joy they'd have, less friction and money saved if they got rid of their manager. ;-)

sgt 14y ago

I am productive using my 15 inch Macbook Pro. They offered me a Samsung 23 inch monitor but the quality was poorer than my MBP's screen, and it looked cheap and not very elegant to share the same deskspace.

ntoshev 14y ago

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nicholassmith 14y ago

Hm, I think a few people have missed the point of the post by the 'omg how self-entitled' posts I've just scanned through. This isn't just about getting bigger monitors, or a fancy email or a dozen other things, it's about companies that don't understand the development environment that works best is whatever the developer needs. Your company makes software? The developers are their biggest asset. Plus given a blank cheque most of us wouldn't go wild, we understand what we need and skip the rest.

deleted 14y ago

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Joeboy 14y ago

Choose your own email address? It can take weeks of hassling here to get any email address set up here. I consider it a luxury to be able to receive email, clone our git repositories or connect to webservices I'm coding for. On the plus side I've got quite good at setting up ssh tunnels.

hackermom 14y ago

[detached] melissa@tellus$ whoami melissa Last login: Fri May 18 09:29:53 on ttys002 MelBook:~ melissa$ whoami melissa phew!

jiggy2011 14y ago

2 large monitors? really? How very 2004, I thought all the rockstar programmers these days did everything from starbucks on an 11" Macbook air or through an SSH session from their iPad!

vidarh 14y ago
Except at Github, apparently: http://instagr.am/p/Kt05fpp2OL/ http://instagr.am/p/Kt05fpp2OL/

hessenwolf 14y ago

As somebody squeezing my eyes into a 19 inch with shitty resolution, I see where you are coming from. Also, I don't have admin access to my computer. I'm forcibly handicapped.

ticks 14y ago

If someone's complaining about the size of a monitor as a reason for leaving then there's a good chance that it isn't the monitors! People don't like burning bridges when they leave a job, so they are highly unlikely to say the real reason - especially when the person that's asking for the reason is the actual problem.

sethg 14y ago
Yeah, the monitor isn’t the reason; the monitor is a symptom. Best Buy is selling 27" monitors for about $300 and 30" monitors for about $1,500. As a percentage of a full-time developer’s salary, depreciated over three years, $600 is pocket change and even $3,000 is defensible. So if a company is nickel-and-diming its developers over this kind of thing, what does that say about the overall attitude of the management?

varelse 14y ago

Google is the only employer that ever offered me a 30" monitor from day one. Google was also the absolute worst employer of my professional career. I've gone into why on other threads - just take it as a given that Google and I really really clashed culturally - and the best thing to do was to leave as fast as I possibly could. That said, I can certainly see a manager who asks upfront what I need to be productive as a good sign and an absolute refusal to consider such needs as a bad one.

yashchandra 14y ago

Amen to Dual Monitors

MattRogish 14y ago

We have an unlimited budget for hardware. You want three monitors? You got it. A desktop and a laptop? Sold. The caveat of course, is be a reasonable adult and don't ask for a $50,000 gold-plated MacBook or something. As long as you can get more incremental value out of the hardware than it costs for us to get it for you, it's yours. I think it all comes down to trust - as the article states, it's not about bigger monitors but the company trusting you to do the right thing.

joshu 14y ago

Is it just me or is too many monitors distracting? I find that I have cut down to just one monitor at both work and home. I was using one monitor for work and one monitor for communication. I realized it was easier just to quit the chat apps. (Mind you, at the company I run, employees get whatever they want, hardware-wise. Everyone seems to have settled on the 27" apple monitor + the laptop display.)