In 2016 I bought a $700 40in curved 4k monitor for my job at Amazon. It's funny they probably spent over $1500 on a laptop I almost never used but did not want to pay for a decent monitor.
I really don't get the curved monitors for working. They're fine if you're playing a video game or watching a movie in the dark at home, I guess, but wouldn't want one for other uses.
They are wider than is comfortable to view at once from the short distance many office desks offer, especially if they're on a flex arm that eats up more space. They seem optimally designed to ensure that you'll have glare on your screen no matter how you position it in any kind of well lit environment. They don't offer the window management affordances that having separate screens do, or they have some weird software kludges to do similar.
But for developers and designers working on user-facing software: I recommend keeping at least one poor to profoundly shitty monitor in your setup. Both resolution and color rendering accuracy matter here.
If you have everyone on fancy MacBooks and excellent high end monitors, you will tend to miss defects in your design that will affect your customers - things like poor color contrast (I don’t think the accessibility tools care about contrast of non-text elements), elements that are too thin to be seen comfortably or lead to weird aliasing, etc.
Microsoft famously made this mistake with their Fluent UI design (or some version of it); 1px borders with huge corner radii that ended up looking “cut off” on standard corporate monitors (like the ones 99.999% of their target audience are subjected to).
P.S. to have some empathy for the corporate IT department, if they are handing out Dell laptops to thousands of people, up until relatively recently they very likely would struggle to handle two or sometimes even one 4K monitor. And Windows high DPI handling is a potentially huge support burden if there is any sort of diversity in the software in use.
Edit: turns out the author themselves wrote about how painful good/4K monitors could be to use. Apparently it was essentially unusable for them in late 2019, although that doesn’t match my personal experience - I was using 4K monitors in windows with only occasional issues as early as 2018. https://etbe.coker.com.au/2019/11/18/4k-monitors/
In a former life about ten years ago I transitioned to managing a long-established, mature development team. Some of the developers had a couple of monitors. I think the largest was maybe a 19" model. Our business users, who sat on the opposite side of the building, and who they visited frequently, sported 3 monitor setups, each 24", maybe even 27". The main point was that our business users had more and substantially better equipment than the dev team. The devs were not happy about this. I was not happy about this.
Thankfully I had a reasonable boss. Apparently the argument, "we can't design UIs, we can recreate how our users actually use our product" hadn't been tried before or at least hadn't been successful. Suffice it to say I put in an order that recreated the UX of our business users.
I shared this news with my peer managers in the department. They followed my tack, and soon enough at least 3 other teams were rocking decent equipment.
Then the VP got wind of it, and said, "No more orders for new equipment until the existing equipment is EOL", or something like that. You know, okay, I get it, we're talking a lot of monitors. But, dammit, people were just a little happier, or maybe just not as pissed off at one thing we could control.
I didn't even try to expense the 43" 4K TV I used for a monitor at home.
If you are working with text a monitor with high pixel density is important. 4K 27” is good for Windows, 5K 27” is great for Macs. I think companies should provide a monitor of this calibre and a laptop powerful enough to easily drive them to technical workers. I would spend my own money on the hardware if I could use it for work. It’s like if a company said they will give you a $5000 pay raise, but you have to use a 2006 flip phone from now on. I think a lot of people would refuse the raise.
One of many questions at the interview will be asking what hardware they offer and what furniture. I had PTSD from sitting on a cheap office chair and developed massive back pain. If there isn't at least Herman Miller, anything else doesn't matter.
One nice aspect of WFH is that it addresses this problem. You get a laptop and $500-1500 for hardware and many places you get it again after an interval (1-3 years).
I have two Apple Studio monitors and a max-ram MacBook Pro. Work only paid for the MBP and only after I jumped through the necessary hoops, which I was happy to do. Had they not, I would have just dropped the $6k myself. One time I did drop the $6k myself and then showed my manager. Show don’t tell. He expensed it for me.
A company would be foolish to buy everyone this gear. I buy it because it makes a difference for me , my eyes and my patience. When I was a kid, I had a 12” TV, not even a monitor. I’m not a kid anymore more. I think of it as a professional buys their own tools.
The happiest I have ever been with my monitors was with 2x 24 inch 1440 displays (dell s2421sgf) - it’s not an IPS display but it’s a single panel high refresh rate with solid software support and good color mapping. I calibrated it and it was worse than my MacBook but only slightly.
Unfortunately they appear to have a shelf life of about 6 years and the panels are no longer made…
First job I had was a pair-programming shop that outfitted each station with a 27" iMac and a 27" Cinema display (along with two sets of mice and keyboards).
Second job was remote, so I outfitted my own home office. I upgraded from a 34" 21:9 monitor to a 32:9 monster and enjoyed having the equivalent of 2x27" monitors.
I've since upgraded that setup to add a 28" LG DualUp to the left side of my 32:9 ultrawide. It strikes a nice balance of a productivity display for calendar/email and one for my main workspace that's plenty wide for spreadsheets (because I write less code than spreadsheets for FinOps modeling work).
I'm a huge fan of wider aspect ratios beyond 16:9 or 16:10. The dream is a 32:10 monitor in tandem OLED.
The only way to get an extra monitor during my first stint at AWS was to loot one from the desk of a departing colleague (before IT got their hands on it). Fortunately there was no shortage of departing colleagues.
Frugality at its best. Sometimes certain decisions prioritize frugality so much over anything else, the time lost fighting is more expensive than the savings.
For example, the DevDesktop policy. My org had an Apollo/FMC fleet that only allowed 2-4 CPU and 4-8 GB RAM configurations. Anything else would require manual financial approval and justification from L6+ manager. This is between 2022-2024.
Take the following example, to save maybe 20-30$/month. You make engineers' life miserable while paying the same amount but in hourly rate...
When you run VSCode with bunch of Java plugins (where each uses Java), good luck reliably debugging anything. Me and basically anyone in my team would get into situation that the DevDesktop could not handle it anymore and would be stuck, requiring manual/hard restart or wait until load-avg dropping from 100+.
I did the simplest trick, kept the m5.large DevDesktop, but manually added another Apollo ASG, attached the HostClass to a random Production fleet that already has thousands of hosts (still under/in my VP org). Happily lived with m5zn.4xlarge until I left. I am pretty sure the machine is still there and running... (As my access was cut off right away...)
Recently I’ve often wondered if LLM productivity gains (for coding) could end up mirroring the productivity gains of a good monitor setup.
That is, table stake on the one hand (nobody likes to work for a company stingy enough to refuse to buy one or two more screens per worker), but also not obviously more productive either (it is not easy to measure the productivity gain of a monitor setup and most developers who are productive with it will also be productive without).
If LLMs do not bring a lot more value to the company than providing a good monitor setup to every tech employee, this is a clue that once the bubble pops AI expenses should not be priced very differently than a bunch of screens (~700$ per worker per three years?)
Just started a new remote contracting gig and did a one-week on-site “getting to know each other” thing. I was shocked that everyone in the office had dual 27” 1080p monitors. Didn’t know they even made 1080p monitors that big!
Anyway after a week of staring at that blurry mess I was having eye focusing issues every night trying to read a book. Those monitors should be treated as ergonomic hazard. Total disgrace.
Teams still does not make it easy to share your screen when you have a non-standard size. Have to either make the receiver deal with the size mismatch, or share a single window at a time. I have to maintain a 1080p monitor on the side just to have a convenient place to host a screen share.
Come on, Microsoft, please. I would even take a vibe-coded, crap solution that only works on Tuesdays.
> It wouldn’t be difficult for someone to put one of those on each side of the monitor or monitors that their employer provides and put them in a desk drawer at the end of the day to minimise risk.
In a decade of working in IT I’ve never seen a broken monitor in any of the offices. I think the risk is vastly overestimated by the author
For my home office I started experimenting with a 4k60” TV far away from my desk. For some reason I like it more than my 6k32”retina setup I have at my work.
I had 3x32" 4k at 100% scaling for the longest time (32" 4k is still the best bang for buck right now imo). Main horizontal center display and a vertical on each side, angled aggressively towards my head.
But 4k is quite weird for productivity, if you do two columns you get 1920px on each side with a split right in the middle, which is far from ideal. With 3 column layout you end up with 1280px a piece, which ends up being too cramped with most apps.
Recently I got a 40" 5120x2160 LG display which ends up being about the same PPI as 32" 4k, but it lets you have three 1706px columns, which is much more comfortable. It's quite nice, but unreasonably expensive. I could've bought three 32" 4k for the same price.
> Big monitors are the easiest way to increase white-collar productivity, and anyone who makes at least $50,000 per year ought to have at least 1600×1200 screen resolution. A flat-panel display with this resolution currently costs less than $500. So, as long as the bigger display increases productivity by at least 0.5%, you'll recover the investment in less than a year.
Bit of a counter point, but I ran a very nice wfh setup at a previous job, 4k monitor and ergo keyboards. I was a bit dismayed when I joined a new co and found that we had 1080p monitors and a generic Logitech keyboard. After a week of the text looking pixelated I entirely got used to it and think maybe complaints about monitors being a health hazard and rsi are a tad overblown by a vocal minority.
Over the years I've settled on 27" 1440p IPS monitors. 2 on my office desk, 3 on my home desk.
I'm currently very satisfied with the Dell P2725DE [1] b/c of the following:
1. 100 Hz refresh rate. I stopped using 60Hz refresh rate monitors years ago and won't go back.
2. Much cleaner cabling. At work I only need to 2 cables: laptop -> usb-c cable -> monitor 1 -> Display Port MST cable -> monitor 2. The usb-c cable from my laptop to monitor 1 provides video and power. And being able to daisy chain from monitor 1 to monitor 2 helps minimize cable clutter (this cable routes out of sight along my monitor arm).
I got all of them refurbished at $163 each. I still feel that's an excellent price b/c, if I recall correctly, few others, if any, offered this unique combo of features I was looking for.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 36.1 ms ] threadThey are wider than is comfortable to view at once from the short distance many office desks offer, especially if they're on a flex arm that eats up more space. They seem optimally designed to ensure that you'll have glare on your screen no matter how you position it in any kind of well lit environment. They don't offer the window management affordances that having separate screens do, or they have some weird software kludges to do similar.
But for developers and designers working on user-facing software: I recommend keeping at least one poor to profoundly shitty monitor in your setup. Both resolution and color rendering accuracy matter here.
If you have everyone on fancy MacBooks and excellent high end monitors, you will tend to miss defects in your design that will affect your customers - things like poor color contrast (I don’t think the accessibility tools care about contrast of non-text elements), elements that are too thin to be seen comfortably or lead to weird aliasing, etc.
Microsoft famously made this mistake with their Fluent UI design (or some version of it); 1px borders with huge corner radii that ended up looking “cut off” on standard corporate monitors (like the ones 99.999% of their target audience are subjected to).
P.S. to have some empathy for the corporate IT department, if they are handing out Dell laptops to thousands of people, up until relatively recently they very likely would struggle to handle two or sometimes even one 4K monitor. And Windows high DPI handling is a potentially huge support burden if there is any sort of diversity in the software in use.
Edit: turns out the author themselves wrote about how painful good/4K monitors could be to use. Apparently it was essentially unusable for them in late 2019, although that doesn’t match my personal experience - I was using 4K monitors in windows with only occasional issues as early as 2018. https://etbe.coker.com.au/2019/11/18/4k-monitors/
Thankfully I had a reasonable boss. Apparently the argument, "we can't design UIs, we can recreate how our users actually use our product" hadn't been tried before or at least hadn't been successful. Suffice it to say I put in an order that recreated the UX of our business users.
I shared this news with my peer managers in the department. They followed my tack, and soon enough at least 3 other teams were rocking decent equipment.
Then the VP got wind of it, and said, "No more orders for new equipment until the existing equipment is EOL", or something like that. You know, okay, I get it, we're talking a lot of monitors. But, dammit, people were just a little happier, or maybe just not as pissed off at one thing we could control.
I didn't even try to expense the 43" 4K TV I used for a monitor at home.
A company would be foolish to buy everyone this gear. I buy it because it makes a difference for me , my eyes and my patience. When I was a kid, I had a 12” TV, not even a monitor. I’m not a kid anymore more. I think of it as a professional buys their own tools.
Unfortunately they appear to have a shelf life of about 6 years and the panels are no longer made…
Second job was remote, so I outfitted my own home office. I upgraded from a 34" 21:9 monitor to a 32:9 monster and enjoyed having the equivalent of 2x27" monitors.
I've since upgraded that setup to add a 28" LG DualUp to the left side of my 32:9 ultrawide. It strikes a nice balance of a productivity display for calendar/email and one for my main workspace that's plenty wide for spreadsheets (because I write less code than spreadsheets for FinOps modeling work).
I'm a huge fan of wider aspect ratios beyond 16:9 or 16:10. The dream is a 32:10 monitor in tandem OLED.
Take the following example, to save maybe 20-30$/month. You make engineers' life miserable while paying the same amount but in hourly rate...
When you run VSCode with bunch of Java plugins (where each uses Java), good luck reliably debugging anything. Me and basically anyone in my team would get into situation that the DevDesktop could not handle it anymore and would be stuck, requiring manual/hard restart or wait until load-avg dropping from 100+. I did the simplest trick, kept the m5.large DevDesktop, but manually added another Apollo ASG, attached the HostClass to a random Production fleet that already has thousands of hosts (still under/in my VP org). Happily lived with m5zn.4xlarge until I left. I am pretty sure the machine is still there and running... (As my access was cut off right away...)
no one can claim a specific monitor or tool is universally "correct" - that's crazy
That is, table stake on the one hand (nobody likes to work for a company stingy enough to refuse to buy one or two more screens per worker), but also not obviously more productive either (it is not easy to measure the productivity gain of a monitor setup and most developers who are productive with it will also be productive without).
If LLMs do not bring a lot more value to the company than providing a good monitor setup to every tech employee, this is a clue that once the bubble pops AI expenses should not be priced very differently than a bunch of screens (~700$ per worker per three years?)
Anyway after a week of staring at that blurry mess I was having eye focusing issues every night trying to read a book. Those monitors should be treated as ergonomic hazard. Total disgrace.
Come on, Microsoft, please. I would even take a vibe-coded, crap solution that only works on Tuesdays.
Especially a second monitor. Often just used for watching youtube videos during work
In a decade of working in IT I’ve never seen a broken monitor in any of the offices. I think the risk is vastly overestimated by the author
One for work. One for communication. One for documentation.
But 4k is quite weird for productivity, if you do two columns you get 1920px on each side with a split right in the middle, which is far from ideal. With 3 column layout you end up with 1280px a piece, which ends up being too cramped with most apps.
Recently I got a 40" 5120x2160 LG display which ends up being about the same PPI as 32" 4k, but it lets you have three 1706px columns, which is much more comfortable. It's quite nice, but unreasonably expensive. I could've bought three 32" 4k for the same price.
> Big monitors are the easiest way to increase white-collar productivity, and anyone who makes at least $50,000 per year ought to have at least 1600×1200 screen resolution. A flat-panel display with this resolution currently costs less than $500. So, as long as the bigger display increases productivity by at least 0.5%, you'll recover the investment in less than a year.
Surely the economics must be even better in 2026?
I'm currently very satisfied with the Dell P2725DE [1] b/c of the following:
1. 100 Hz refresh rate. I stopped using 60Hz refresh rate monitors years ago and won't go back.
2. Much cleaner cabling. At work I only need to 2 cables: laptop -> usb-c cable -> monitor 1 -> Display Port MST cable -> monitor 2. The usb-c cable from my laptop to monitor 1 provides video and power. And being able to daisy chain from monitor 1 to monitor 2 helps minimize cable clutter (this cable routes out of sight along my monitor arm).
I got all of them refurbished at $163 each. I still feel that's an excellent price b/c, if I recall correctly, few others, if any, offered this unique combo of features I was looking for.
[1] https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-pro-27-plus-qhd-usb-c-h...