Hacker News Reader

Comment by jwegan | Hacker News Reader

    2. Observe the working conditions. They reveal a lot about the company's philosophies towards its employees.
    
    You're looking for top notch monitors, chairs, desks, and computers. Look at how much space each programmer has and if the environment is quiet or not.
    
    A top notch work environment is a good investment for maximizing the productivity of programmers and keeping them happy and healthy. Anything less than a top notch work environment is an indication that the company is overly focused on keeping costs low and is cheap with its employees.

I would disagree with this point. While it is important to have quality monitors and computers, I don't think it is necessary for an early stage startup to go splurging money on nice desks and chairs. In fact, some might take it as a sign the startup is not spendthrift enough and thus more likely to not have enough runway.

View on HN

You can always tell the people who have yet to experience a symptom of RSI.

"Splurging"? A one-time cost of maybe a thousand dollars? For an employee whose value is presumably somewhere north of $100 an hour?

If you can't raise the money for a decent desk by, say, the fourth month I think it's reasonable to question your company's future. Find cheaper office space, spend a couple of days consulting, pick stuff out of the dumpsters in back of a larger company, whatever, but get yourselves some decent tools.

Use doors for desks (a huge door desk might cost you $50 and 2 hours a Saturday afternoon) and spent a lot of money on chairs.

As someone who has bad wrists from working on shitty desks, I can assure you that it matters. A good desk a fraction of an employee's annual cost. If you can't afford a desk, you can't afford to hire.

Damn right. Everybody who hasn't had a problem yet, take it from me: you need to worry about this stuff before you get an RSI. Please.

A desk is just a sturdy flat thing, how can that go wrong? Did you have chairs that didn't adjust to its height?

Most chairs don't adjust high enough to achieve a 90degree elbow bend with the average non-adjustable desk.

Typically the problem is that the desk won't adjust to my height.

You just have to use your common sense. If the company hasn't raised much cash yet, then it makes sense that they might be tight with the purse strings. You'd expect this to be a temporary situation.

In general though, the salary of the employee dwarfs the cost of providing a top notch working environment, so it's in the startup's best interest to maximize their already large investment in the employee.

Man, that's 4 times in a couple of inches of screen space. You really seem to like the term "top notch" :-)

Actually, I suspect that you and the author might be in agreement. Your "quality monitors and computers" would be considered "top notch" by many companies, not because they actually are, but because said companies don't care about treating their developers well. My home office is basically an Ikea Jerker desk, and an Aeron chair that I bought used on craigslist for $500 (CAD). I think most employers would consider that a top notch setup for a developer. :(

Reply on news.ycombinator.com