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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
I always prefer lots of screens of different sizes on a few machines (some running while in different states of deconstruction), as while you can never have too many pixels available, sometimes you may not want to use them all at once. And also computers just die sometimes, so I never like to try and rely on just one of them.
Right with you on things that impact productivity, e.g. monitors, chairs, etc., but coming from finance I'm impressed by how Silicon Valley will take huge pay cuts for little things like catered food, pinball machines, or hammocks. I didn't realise it until a VC (not going to name them, but a big one) showed me a graph during his pitch of how much less his start-ups pay in cash + equity versus similar companies for "throwing candy bars at the coders".
Because I spend at least 8 hours of every weekday- often 60% of my waking day (more if you skip commuting/eating/etc). Salary generally improves my life outside of work, but niceties at the office improve the chunk of my life that money can't. A $900 chair that lasts for 5 years is negligible next to my salary in terms of actual cost to the company, but it huge in terms of the impact on my life.
They're not mutually exclusive. The pay difference is often substantially more than the cost of the benefits disbursed, i.e. if salaries were normalised you could more than buy all the benefits on your own. Salary can improve your life at work as well, e.g. I got sick of waiting for my seventh monitor and so just bought one while procurement did its 6 days for a line of code routine.
I got yelled at once for adding 512meg of ram to my corporate desktop out of my own pocket. Went from either 256 or 512 to 768 or 1gig - can't remember. Either way, I was transitioning in to some Java/Eclipse work, and the current RAM wasn't cutting it, so after waiting for a couple weeks, I just went to the store and bought some. Apparently, that's not good. :/
> Salary generally improves my life outside of work
It also reduces the amount of time you are dependent on someone else to write you paychecks and reduces the likelihood that you will be stuck in an undesirable situation due to financials.
I would rather have a higher salary at a place that let me buy and use my own $900 chair, second monitor, or what have you, because the salary increase will likely be much greater than the cost of those items and the company's willingness to let me do that tells me quite a bit about the environment and culture I will be working in.
At my previous work we used docking stations for the laptops. So at desk I had my big 22" monitor, mouse and regular keyboard connected to my laptop and whenever I am away I still had everything that I worked on with me.
Then again I was a manager so all I had open most of the time was Thunderbird and Excel. I don't know if the extra pixels helped in my case ;).
In any case I would recommend that setup for work.
I have two 24" screens in front of me at work and use all of the screen real estate. One monitor (the one directly in front of me) is for my terminal, controlled by tmux. Most of my windows in tmux are split into panes, with the exception tending to be vim (I use vim's inbuilt panes systems). The other monitor has a browser, skype, office, and performance monitoring apps.
Being allowed to use the laptop that you prefer is a good thing, no?
A bad PHB would happily force you to stop using the laptop and start using the clunky PC with an OS that's slightly tweaked away from what you're familiar[1] with and without allowing you to tweak it back; with some really annoying software that loads on boot that you're not allowed to turn off; and with some stupid seemingly trivial but not at all trivial fault (sticky 'y' key - "It's okay, just type it harder") that'll never get fixed.
But hey, you've got a big monitor now, so why isn't the work done yet?
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.
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.
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.
Yeh I agree with that, I recently joined a new company and was a little disappointed that I wasnt asked what email I wanted 'dale@company.com' (dale is usually just rare enough that I can get firstnames in these situations)
I got dharvey@company.com, and within a few days I realised that every time I needed to email someone I didnt know I never needed to go searching for their email address, I already knew it.
I usually set up "preferred address" (specified by the user, defaulting to firstname), then set up aliases for firstname, lastname, firstname.lastname, firstnamelastname, flastname, firstl.
The thing which annoys me is when I have firstname on a major public service, and other people have weird derivatives (like first1@ or firstl), and I get misdirected mail. On google I have firstname.lastname and an annoying realtor(tm) has firstname.b.lastname@ and I get huge amounts of useless mail.
I wonder why corporate email systems aren't smart enough to take reasonable action. The first time I try to send a message to 'dale' the system should be able to infer the recipient from context. With a good naming convention to avoid false positives (forcing subsquent dales to add a distinguishing letter) this system would be very reliable.
This is solved at my company because we use Google Apps and everyone in the company is auto-completed when typing an email (based on their full-name). Of course we also mostly do a first letter of first name followed by last name as well.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Sometimes an E-mail is used on other company systems as a log-in, in whole or in part. I used to sympathize with past co-workers who had names much longer than mine, imagining them having to type "really_long_first.really_long_last@company.com" just to log into some web site.
I've also seen IT people enforce their random rules on everyone, leading to things like "rba186" as someone's actual E-mail address name instead of something meaningful.
So yes, choosing your own log-in and E-mail name would be pretty nice.
My school did your initials + 4 random digits, presumably to help prevent collisions and spam. It was pretty decent, actually, because you kind of got in the habit of chanting out a username in the same pattern, "a b c, 12, 34".
Works better than my current company, which does first initial + middle initial + 5 letters of your last name.
I've seen initials used too, which is at least a nice hint; but the case I based the example on conjured these characters essentially at random. The real kicker was that they were forced upon users in Unix environments who had been using CVS, Subversion, etc. and went from seeing useful log messages like "changed by jsmith" to aggravating ones like "changed by rjx133".
Nowadays web email services like Gmail set the minimum standard for how email should work. You should be able to choose your email address from what's available, and also create new email addresses whenever you need them (with self service).
If the corporate email system cannot provide service that is as good, then people will start using services like Gmail instead. I see it happen all the time.
Personally I also regard it a sign of cluefulness to have an email address with very short local part. I always hated Gmail's 6-char minimum limit for usernames.
Recently I volunteered for a political campaign, and I signed in with a pen and wrote my email address on the sign-in page. It's mylastname@gmail.com. The campaign director saw this and said to me, "how were you able to get that address?" I said, "I've had Gmail since the day it was offered to the public in 2004." He said, "wow." Not a big deal to me, but email namespaces matter. I totally agree with the OP.
I have one for my wife, son, and I. It makes life so easy when people ask for an email address and I say firstname@firstnamelastname.com (and my surname is really short and really common). Invariably, some think you are some sort of uber hacker because you pay $7/year for this service.
And then they try to send mail to firstnamelastname@gmail.com :) I have a similar domain and people have a shockingly hard time getting it right: "Yes, "john" AT "j" followed by my last name, dot com"
the email doesn't matter, it's the exception to policy. Setting up your email address is probably one of the first things that happens when you get hired. Being told by the boss that it's not worth 5 minutes of IT's time to make you happy is not a good tone to start off a new job with.
At Google your username appears everywhere. In mail, code reviews, chat, irc - everywhere. I know some of my colleagues by their username only, I don't even remember their real names.
When we start we get to specify three usernames in order of preference. You are given the first one that is available. It means a lot to me to be adg@google.com.
I've been posting my e-mail addresses in plaintext all over the web for a good decade and a half. I still use those same addresses. I see no spam. Spam filters work.
Why are people afraid of having their e-mail address out there without obfuscation?
Back when Usenet and mailing lists were the medium for most of the important conversations on the internet (that is, before 1994 or 1995) if you tried to post to Usenet or a mailing list with an obfuscated email address, people would complain (in replies to your post) if the admins running Usenet or the mailing list let your post through at all.
This was enforced with various levels of strictness.
DE usenet is still pretty strict about not allowed munged email addresses, and only allowing you to use an address that you have control of.
Other bits of Usenet would tolerate carefully munged From headers, but insist on empty or real Reply-to headers. (Reply to wasn't returned in a simple header retrieval, meaning it wasn't as often scraped. And it was optional. So either have it real, or don't have it at all.) Other bits didn't care what you did.
Since poorly munged email addresses could cause considerable amounts of spam to be sent to that address it's fair enough to remind people not to inadvertently use another person's real email address.
email filters then were not great; email addresses were scraped; downloading a lot of headers over lousy dial-up was annoying; and huge mailboxes was rare.
Insanely well. I've been posting publicly as dmd@3e.org for 16 years now, and at a few other addresses that forward to that for 22. All of that mail goes to gmail. My spam folder gets ~600 messages per day. I get a false-negative (spam in inbox) about once a month. I check for false-positives (ham in spambox) pretty regularly, but haven't ever found one.
I use Gmail, but I definitely get spam. I get false-positive spam all of the time (mailing lists I'm on have a decent chance of going to the spam box), and whenever a spammer has 'Google' in the email title, it has about a 60% chance of being a false-negative (i.e. showing up in the inbox). I also get false-negatives on spam when there is just a title and message body.
Perhaps Gmail's spam filters are mostly based on how you train them, so people who receive more email get a better filter?
Very interesting! I wonder if spammers steer clear of @gmail.com addresses to prevent Google's algorithms from learning about their spam. (If so, they probably want to steer clear of GAFYD addresses, too, but maybe they don't know how to identify them).
Who cares about how much it filters out? The question is how much false positives does it have? And google most definitely are not good enough to even be usable in that department. If you never know if you've missed something you have to constantly check the filtered mails as well, making the spam filtering much worse than nothing.
If you rely on something as blunt as gmail spam filtering you don't take emailing seriously.
I also remember reading a while back that trying to disguise your email with the "username (at) gmail (dot) com" approach is worse than just putting the raw email out there because it's not only just as easy to sniff out on the page, but you can also search for it in search engines: try searching for "at gmail dot com" vs "@gmail.com" in various search engines
As an engineer, I mostly just use my corporate email for internal communications anyway, so it doesn't bother me at all (ours is first initial, last name, and I have a doozy of a last name). I agree with crazygringo that it's probably a bit of a dangerous yardstick if you're looking for a job in the non-startup world.
May I ask how many letters there are in your last name? Mine has nine letters, and it killed me to work somewhere that my username was "mschiral" and I had to type most of it but then stop two letters early.
It's like Shave and a Haircut without the "two bits".
I have a similar issue where most of the time 'surname+first_initial' means I end up with the last letter of my Surname being cut off. This becomes really annoying as because the email address is structured that way, my name on documents starts cropping up with the typo as well (as people will often just check the email address for the spelling)
Where I work, your username is automatically assigned in this fashion:
First letter is U or V depending on whether you are temp or perm employee.
Next 4 letters are first 4 of last name.
Final two letters are first 2 of first name.
A friend of mine in college had a name that would be mildly offensive and embarrassing to him if it was his first initial and last name. Having your own username/email might be something to think about and would be a rather painless perk to offer to prospective employees.
Like you said, when was the last time you thought about your email address?
For many it doesn't matter, but for some it's a big deal. Either because they have a handle that is important to them, or because what the policy comes up with is unappealing (for many reasons).
My point is: if its important to your engineer, it should be important to the company.
I detest my corporate email name. Detest. It's chosen by formula, part drawn from part of your name, and part drawn from I have no idea. When I first started, HR got my name wrong (my name, not my email), and just assigned me a name. They made something up that let them move to the next form. Then IT applied the email name formula to my made up name.
At one job, I used my usual email (tedu@), until the new IT director decided it wasn't corporate enough, and I got tunangst@. Within days, I started getting emails from recruiters playing guess the email based on my linkedin profile, which I had never received before.
Email addresses, agreed, not so much. But one thing that annoys me where I work is our logins are of the form 'u0123456' (roughly sequentially allocated, but starting from 0100000)... and they're tied to our source control system. So you look through the commit logs, and all you can see are Unumbers - no names. Half the whiteboards in the office are covered in lookup tables of U-to-name.
It's a real downer when someone joins the company too - pretty much the first thing you have tell them is "you're a number now - everything in the company is accessed by this number". You can see in their eyes an "oh shit what have I gotten into" moment.
My email adress at my university contains the full name. But because I have 3 first names, all are included, which brings the total adress to 41 characters. I hate it.
These kinds of details are important though. I've been in a few work environments that were pleasant if you looked at the big picture, but unpleasant once you started adding up all the little details.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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 :|
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...
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.
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 :)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Big monitors, small offices. Give me a room where I can close the door. I'll share it with one other person, but it can't be a tight fit. If you expect me to work while you're interrupting me every 5 minutes, then you don't really expect me to be productive. Also good- conference rooms for ad hoc meetings. (Maybe for the people who like to work together in a room they can take over a conference room or whatever.... make your layout flexible enough.)
One company, when I was hired, asked me to tell them exactly what I wanted computer wise-- I was quite impressed with that. No more being forced to use crappy windows computers, I specified a MacBook Pro, etc. They said "whatever you want, within reason."
But I remember... years of fighting to have decent sized monitors. I think two big monitors is good, three might be a bit better. It seems displays these days are shockingly cheap compared to the value they offer over even just one year.
Yeah, the office thing has always been a function of available space for us. Some of our folks want complete isolation, others like an open environment. I've always tried to accommodate personal preferences, so I try to pull that from folks as we work together. Sometimes, what somebody wanted last year changes with this year; I try to be accommodating to allow everyone to change around; no need letting the workplace get stale, when simple movement can solve a problem.
I always give our engineers their choice of platform -- windows, osx, linux, whatever. I count on them to make sure they have the environment available to develop on. It's up to them to make sure they can work locally. (Shared services like data/caching/etc. are of course handled remotely.)
Our last few hires requested 17-inch Macbook Pro laptops, with dual Thunderbolt displays. Done. I do not sit around wondering if the cost of the tool is worth the expense, as it simply doesn't compare to the cost of the time of the engineer involved. Even if anyone might consider the developer is getting the "better end of the deal", I don't care -- I trust my team to produce. I just simply refuse to let hardware get in the way of potential output.
BTW: if a developer wants three monitors vs. two...great. Again, I trust my team and I have faith in them to make good business decisions about resources. Somebody tells me they want three monitors, it's a task delegated to our asset team. Done.
I'm envious, that's very enlightened. I've mentioned to my current and past bosses the fact that not everyone wants to work in a romper room environment and would actually prefer quiet instead, only to receive incredulous responses. The ability to recognize that your own preferences might not be optimal for everyone else is a surprisingly rare skill.
You sounds like a very enlightened manager. I particularly like your point about evaluating the situation periodically. People's preferences change over time and it's great that you try to adjust as they do.
I don't get this new obsession with "let's just put everyone in a giant room so they can collaborate". I think it's a cop-out to not get bigger/better laid out offices.
Developers need to write code either alone or in pairs. Large places breed interruptions, killing productivity. All these experimental ideas with unassigned offices where anyone uses them when they need to don't work either because people will simply squat on them.
If you want your developers to do actual work instead of being distracted, give them individual offices + lots of shared meeting space with whiteboards. This is the gold standard. Anything less (e.g.: n developers per office) will reduce productivity.
Where baseline is the minimum fraction (0 to 1) of work a developer can get done even while being distracted at all times, and ALPHA is a constant left to the reader to determine. productivity is measured in useful hours per week for the whole team.
I think the relatively recent thing is putting everyone in an open room with nothing really separating you from the person sitting at the long table next to you, as opposed to putting people in cubicles which at least have a tiny suggestion of separation.
In my experience (in bigger companies), if you get to know (to a level of trust) the real estate people and then happen to ask them, they'll tell you the decision is top down and cost-driven. 100%. It's all about square feet (meters) / employee.
That would be the immediate, upfront cost. A real/realistic assessment of expected employee productivity is hard to find. (Though reference to various external "studies" and "assessments" may be made. "Best practices", "industry standards/norms", etc.)
The internal publicity is heavily or entirely about "collaboration" and "facilitation" and "workflow", etc. Whatever. Just ask the people over in real estate (if they trust you).
I agree that distraction and interruption are giant problems, but I don't think that private offices are the only way to solve that.
I'm much happier in team spaces, where everybody who's involved is nearby. You do have to be disciplined to make it a good environment for coding. E.g., requiring that off-topic conversations happen elsewhere, and that people be generally quiet and respectful. But it can definitely work, and it makes collaboration 10x easier.
I'm not sure it's a new obsession -- I've worked in those environments eons ago.
We have a combination of open environment + offices now, with several people sharing offices. Privacy quite often leads to productivity, but I've found it ebbs and flows with people over time. Sometimes a few folks need to be out in the atrium or in the common area, it just really depends. No judgment from us, if they want to crawl in the vent and work, get to climbing!
We always try to make sure we can accommodate most everyone's wishes for workspaces.
Some people prefer an open office environment. I know I do. I just from a job where our whole team sat in one room to a place where we all have our own offices. I kind of hate it. It's not that I'm any more/less productive, it's that all kinds of other conversations just don't happen.
"Did you see that article on hacker news about X?"
"Hey, what do you guys think about this design?"
All of that stuff can happen, but you have to force it to happen by leaving your office. It doesn't happen as naturally. You might think of these as distractions, but I think these are the type of interactions that make people more invested and passionate.
Also, I get WAY more distracted when I have my own office. I find it really easy to just sit and browse the Internet instead of working. When my peers are around me it's harder to get lost on the Internet because I don't want to look like a slacker.
To each their own. I can understand the advantages and disadvantages of both.
I have a whiteboard wall at my office. Let me make a recommendation.
Don't do it. Paint your wall white, or whatever, and get a big sheet of glass (or a few). Mount that sucker on the wall.
Glass doesn't suck up color the way whiteboards do, and it's easy as hell to clean. It's also cheap as all get out - it's a big sheet of sand, after all. And you can do nifty things - arduino, RGB LED, mild paper backing, and you've got a damn mood-light / whiteboard :)
Anyway, I recommend this to everyone I know that talks about this. A company we sub for in VA did this because I was in town when they were planning the whiteboards for their new office, and they love it.
We have a bunch of Ikea glass-top desks, which at first I thought would be lousy. Turns out the glass is far better on your skin than the various other finishes of wood-type desks (the ones from Ikea).
But, huge side benefit -- people are writing notes, designs, etc. all over their desks. It's very cool.
Which is a problem in itself. I understand he needed another monitor. But buying it himself shows the management that they have absolutely no need to invest in that, if devs are ready to buy it themselves in the end.
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.
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.
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)
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/) 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.
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.
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.
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).
Ah, yes, now I am recalling the AC Adapter Saga from my last employer. We all got free cell phones (with free data plans), but for some reason mine didn’t have an AC adapter in the box. No big deal; I could just recharge it over USB. But it took weeks if not months before the adapter actually arrived. I pointed out to the HR person that if they would reimburse me, I would be happy to run out to Radio Shack and buy the appropriate adapter, but of course, That Simply Was Not Done.
The kicker, of course, is that my employer WAS THE COMPANY THAT MADE THE CELL PHONES.
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
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Absolutely true. There is a company here in Charlotte, NC (any dev in Charlotte will know who this is) who puts all the toys on display to attract employees: flat screens on the wall, all the monitors on your desk you can handle, etc. etc. The actual company, though, is a soul-crushing hell hole with more churn than an amish dairy farm. That place is pure evil.
Let's just say the first word in the name is "Red" and the second is "Ventures". And there is no third word. They're consistently on the Inc. 500's "best places to work" list because they strong-arm employees into rating them well and most likely pay for the recognition.
Interesting. A senior manager from Red Ventures came to my school last year to talk about his company and recruit at my school. He made it sound pretty cool but looks can definitely be deceiving.
There's a reason they are always hiring. Churn is accepted and regular practice. The CEO is quoted as saying, "The graveyard is littered with 'indispensable employees'". They chronically under-pay and overwork. I could go on forever, but in summary, they charm perspective employees into a truly toxic and demeaning environment.
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.
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[ 110 ms ] story [ 1084 ms ] threadI'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.
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.
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.
Any critical information you could still keep close, but the less important stuff can be pushed to central monitor(s).
It also reduces the amount of time you are dependent on someone else to write you paychecks and reduces the likelihood that you will be stuck in an undesirable situation due to financials.
I would rather have a higher salary at a place that let me buy and use my own $900 chair, second monitor, or what have you, because the salary increase will likely be much greater than the cost of those items and the company's willingness to let me do that tells me quite a bit about the environment and culture I will be working in.
Then again I was a manager so all I had open most of the time was Thunderbird and Excel. I don't know if the extra pixels helped in my case ;).
In any case I would recommend that setup for work.
A bad PHB would happily force you to stop using the laptop and start using the clunky PC with an OS that's slightly tweaked away from what you're familiar[1] with and without allowing you to tweak it back; with some really annoying software that loads on boot that you're not allowed to turn off; and with some stupid seemingly trivial but not at all trivial fault (sticky 'y' key - "It's okay, just type it harder") that'll never get fixed.
But hey, you've got a big monitor now, so why isn't the work done yet?
[1] Left handed mouse settings, for example.
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.
sigh
I got dharvey@company.com, and within a few days I realised that every time I needed to email someone I didnt know I never needed to go searching for their email address, I already knew it.
The thing which annoys me is when I have firstname on a major public service, and other people have weird derivatives (like first1@ or firstl), and I get misdirected mail. On google I have firstname.lastname and an annoying realtor(tm) has firstname.b.lastname@ and I get huge amounts of useless mail.
With good directory typeahead (I won't mention the system because its blue and yellow and smells), it's not really a problem.
No you don't. Choosing a name like "GodHatesFags' would be a firing offense at any law-abiding company in the US.
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.
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?
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.
I've also seen IT people enforce their random rules on everyone, leading to things like "rba186" as someone's actual E-mail address name instead of something meaningful.
So yes, choosing your own log-in and E-mail name would be pretty nice.
Works better than my current company, which does first initial + middle initial + 5 letters of your last name.
If the corporate email system cannot provide service that is as good, then people will start using services like Gmail instead. I see it happen all the time.
Personally I also regard it a sign of cluefulness to have an email address with very short local part. I always hated Gmail's 6-char minimum limit for usernames.
When we start we get to specify three usernames in order of preference. You are given the first one that is available. It means a lot to me to be adg@google.com.
Why are people afraid of having their e-mail address out there without obfuscation?
DE usenet is still pretty strict about not allowed munged email addresses, and only allowing you to use an address that you have control of.
Other bits of Usenet would tolerate carefully munged From headers, but insist on empty or real Reply-to headers. (Reply to wasn't returned in a simple header retrieval, meaning it wasn't as often scraped. And it was optional. So either have it real, or don't have it at all.) Other bits didn't care what you did.
Since poorly munged email addresses could cause considerable amounts of spam to be sent to that address it's fair enough to remind people not to inadvertently use another person's real email address.
email filters then were not great; email addresses were scraped; downloading a lot of headers over lousy dial-up was annoying; and huge mailboxes was rare.
before 1994?
At my last job (large, successful startup) I got the wildcard mail and got close to zero spam. Gmail spam filtering definitely works very well.
Perhaps Gmail's spam filters are mostly based on how you train them, so people who receive more email get a better filter?
If you rely on something as blunt as gmail spam filtering you don't take emailing seriously.
edit: source: http://varenhor.st/2010/01/email-at-domain-dot-com-is-making...
It's like Shave and a Haircut without the "two bits".
This is what makes me miss working at reddit.
First letter is U or V depending on whether you are temp or perm employee. Next 4 letters are first 4 of last name. Final two letters are first 2 of first name.
I'm vmamema
Nice to meet you
Like you said, when was the last time you thought about your email address?
My point is: if its important to your engineer, it should be important to the company.
It's a real downer when someone joins the company too - pretty much the first thing you have tell them is "you're a number now - everything in the company is accessed by this number". You can see in their eyes an "oh shit what have I gotten into" moment.
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.)
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.
My identity is with my personal email addresses. Company address is ephemeral and "throw-away" over the long haul.
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).
For that matter, we also let everyone pick their own email address as well.
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.
And it's not just for email, it's for a huge number of custom applications that use the Notes framework.
Projects.
Asking for and giving things that fit that description is common sense, not being an entitled whiner.
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.
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.
One company, when I was hired, asked me to tell them exactly what I wanted computer wise-- I was quite impressed with that. No more being forced to use crappy windows computers, I specified a MacBook Pro, etc. They said "whatever you want, within reason."
But I remember... years of fighting to have decent sized monitors. I think two big monitors is good, three might be a bit better. It seems displays these days are shockingly cheap compared to the value they offer over even just one year.
I laughed at this part of your post.
I always give our engineers their choice of platform -- windows, osx, linux, whatever. I count on them to make sure they have the environment available to develop on. It's up to them to make sure they can work locally. (Shared services like data/caching/etc. are of course handled remotely.)
Our last few hires requested 17-inch Macbook Pro laptops, with dual Thunderbolt displays. Done. I do not sit around wondering if the cost of the tool is worth the expense, as it simply doesn't compare to the cost of the time of the engineer involved. Even if anyone might consider the developer is getting the "better end of the deal", I don't care -- I trust my team to produce. I just simply refuse to let hardware get in the way of potential output.
BTW: if a developer wants three monitors vs. two...great. Again, I trust my team and I have faith in them to make good business decisions about resources. Somebody tells me they want three monitors, it's a task delegated to our asset team. Done.
The stapler broke. A nice stapler costs just £10. It will last, with care, ten years.
I ask for a stapler. I get given a nasty plastic[1] bit of rubbish. It breaks after half a day. I use my minimum wage to buy myself a stapler.
I learn to hate that employer.
[1] the plastic was nasty - that translucent coloured plastic popular when iMacs appeared.
Developers need to write code either alone or in pairs. Large places breed interruptions, killing productivity. All these experimental ideas with unassigned offices where anyone uses them when they need to don't work either because people will simply squat on them.
If you want your developers to do actual work instead of being distracted, give them individual offices + lots of shared meeting space with whiteboards. This is the gold standard. Anything less (e.g.: n developers per office) will reduce productivity.
Here's my formula:
Where baseline is the minimum fraction (0 to 1) of work a developer can get done even while being distracted at all times, and ALPHA is a constant left to the reader to determine. productivity is measured in useful hours per week for the whole team.That would be the immediate, upfront cost. A real/realistic assessment of expected employee productivity is hard to find. (Though reference to various external "studies" and "assessments" may be made. "Best practices", "industry standards/norms", etc.)
The internal publicity is heavily or entirely about "collaboration" and "facilitation" and "workflow", etc. Whatever. Just ask the people over in real estate (if they trust you).
I'm much happier in team spaces, where everybody who's involved is nearby. You do have to be disciplined to make it a good environment for coding. E.g., requiring that off-topic conversations happen elsewhere, and that people be generally quiet and respectful. But it can definitely work, and it makes collaboration 10x easier.
We have a combination of open environment + offices now, with several people sharing offices. Privacy quite often leads to productivity, but I've found it ebbs and flows with people over time. Sometimes a few folks need to be out in the atrium or in the common area, it just really depends. No judgment from us, if they want to crawl in the vent and work, get to climbing!
We always try to make sure we can accommodate most everyone's wishes for workspaces.
"Did you see that article on hacker news about X?" "Hey, what do you guys think about this design?"
All of that stuff can happen, but you have to force it to happen by leaving your office. It doesn't happen as naturally. You might think of these as distractions, but I think these are the type of interactions that make people more invested and passionate.
Also, I get WAY more distracted when I have my own office. I find it really easy to just sit and browse the Internet instead of working. When my peers are around me it's harder to get lost on the Internet because I don't want to look like a slacker.
To each their own. I can understand the advantages and disadvantages of both.
I've currently got a ~4' whiteboard, a ~13" laptop with a ~15" 4:3 monitor attached to it in my cube.
Takes some getting used to compared to the IdeaPaint-covered WALL at my home office and the two 24" widescreens.
Don't do it. Paint your wall white, or whatever, and get a big sheet of glass (or a few). Mount that sucker on the wall.
Glass doesn't suck up color the way whiteboards do, and it's easy as hell to clean. It's also cheap as all get out - it's a big sheet of sand, after all. And you can do nifty things - arduino, RGB LED, mild paper backing, and you've got a damn mood-light / whiteboard :)
Anyway, I recommend this to everyone I know that talks about this. A company we sub for in VA did this because I was in town when they were planning the whiteboards for their new office, and they love it.
We have a bunch of Ikea glass-top desks, which at first I thought would be lousy. Turns out the glass is far better on your skin than the various other finishes of wood-type desks (the ones from Ikea).
But, huge side benefit -- people are writing notes, designs, etc. all over their desks. It's very cool.
The only ones who got dual monitors were management and HR. One of our developers wanted two monitors - he was told to go buy them himself, so he did.
Whiteboard? More frequent is post-it notes.
Current development equipment - Was doing kernel development in 2003 on Pentium 75s.
Which is a problem in itself. I understand he needed another monitor. But buying it himself shows the management that they have absolutely no need to invest in that, if devs are ready to buy it themselves in the end.
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.
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.
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).
The kicker, of course, is that my employer WAS THE COMPANY THAT MADE THE CELL PHONES.
he hacked a regular tv instead, and that's how apple was born
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'...
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 :)
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.
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.
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.