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Comment by drewg123 | Hacker News Reader

When I worked at Google, I really missed the dual monitor setup I had had at my previous job. I asked my manager how to get a 2nd monitor. Apparently, since I had the larger monitor, I was not allowed to get a 2nd one without all kinds of hassle. I asked if I was allowed to just buy one from Amazon and plug it in, and I was told no. I finally just grabbed an older one that had been sitting in the hallway of the cube-farm next to us for a few days, waiting for to be picked up and re-used. I'm sure somebody's inventory sheet finally made sense 2 years later when I quit, and they collected that monitor along with the rest of my stuff.

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I have a hilarious story about this from Google:

I wanted second 30" monitor, so I filed a ticket. They sent me long email listing reasons why I shouldn't get a second monitor, including (numbers are approximate, employee count from 2013 or so) "If every googler gets an extra monitor, in a year it would be equivalent to driving Toyota Camry for 18000 miles."

I'm thinking "this can't possible be right", so I spend some time calculating, and it turned out to be approximately correct. So I'm thinking, "we should hire one less person and give everyone an extra monitor!". I replied "yes, I understand, go ahead and give me an extra monitor anyway". They replied "we'll require triple management approval!". Me: "please proceed". First two managers approved the request, director emails me "Why I'm bother with this?". Me: "they want your approval to give me second monitor", him: "whatever".

And finally few days later I got a second monitor...

> They sent me long email listing reasons why I shouldn't get a second monitor

I had no idea Google was so cheap. Gourmet breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day? No problem. A couple hundred bucks for a second monitor? Uh... it's not about the money, we're, uh, concerned about the environment.

To be fair back then decent 30" monitors were around $800-$1000. (Also, it's just normal food, not "gourmet".)

But it’s certainly a step up from standard corporate catering

> Gourmet breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day? No problem.

These eke a few more hours of work out of you per day.

> A couple hundred bucks for a second monitor?

Arguments about productivity aside (I agree, more productive), these don't.

When I started at Amazon they gave us dual 22" monitors. I bought dual 27" dells and a gfx card to back them and plugged it in. I also explained how much I was swapping with 8gb and a virt (45 minutes of lost productivity a day), and ram was $86. Manager happily expensed ram for me and the rest of the team . 2 years later that was the standard setup. Now I have 7 monitors and 3 PC's from multiple projects and oses and hardware reups and interns. None funded by me. The dells are happily on my quad tree at home.

Amazon also allows you to byoc and image it. Images are easily available. Bias for action gets u far.

TIL Bias for action.

As did I and the excellent rabbit hole that it led to.

A colleague at my office recently brought in a 43" 4K TV to use as a monitor. He was reimbursed immediately.

After a few days I bought one, too, took it home, and took the 2x 23" monitors it replaced to the office.

In a different department another friend systematically acquired new large monitors for her dev team. Her management chain complained about the expense.

Bias for action not only gets you far, it attracts folks to your team inside a company. ;-)

When I worked at Amazon in 2009 I brought my own monitor, chair and keyboard, because standard one were, well... sub-standard. :)

At an old job I managed to snag a 30" monitor from a colleague who was moving to a different job. He managed to get it in the brief window that it was offered instead of 26" ones. When I announced that I was moving on, the vultures started circling over who would get the monitor.

The inventory sheet will never be reconciled over that monitor, unless it breaks.

My company has the same policy - one monitor per employee. When I wanted a second one, I bought my own, set it up over the weekend, and when someone from IT finally noticed it a month or so later, I just said "Oh, I found it in the hardware e-waste pile over by the server room"

Not sure if I can take it with when I leave, but hey, at least now I have my second monitor and it cost less than $300 - I'll probably bequeath it to a fellow employee.

Reminds me of the time when LCD monitors were just taking over. The software team had budgeted and gotten approval for nice new development system along with a large LCD monitor. As we tried to place the order, the IT manager gets hold and makes a big fuss about it. Given that the CEO even approved it, it caught us off guard. Best we could tell she was butt hurt for us getting LCD monitors before their team did.

Wow, no dual/triple monitor setup is just uncivilized.

There was a choice between a "big" single monitor, or a "small" dual monitor setup. I had just not realized how much I used the framing of the 2 monitors to stay organized, and I chose the "big" single monitor setup. That turned out to be a mistake. The point is that it was easier to "dumpster dive" for a second small monitor than it was to get one in a legit way...

At my employer, I happened to get one of the first machines they built with SSDs (in 2014) and one of the last machines they issued as desktop instead of laptop.

A year later they stopped issuing SSDs and I have to do the whole "managerial approval" thing to get any variation from the "standard" machine, so I am more than a year overdue for a replacement.

When decent monitors cost like $100-$150, it's nuts. I've got a quad 27" setup. I'd like to have more, but things get a little dodgy when you run out of real video ouputs and have to start using displaylink usb adapters.

I always waited until my interns left and then "collected" their monitors. Eventually I had too many monitors (Just managing the asset tags and reconciling things was a huge pain.), and replaced everything with a small 24" 4K.

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