Why Quit? Because the other company has bigger monitors.
sef.kloninger.com
sef.kloninger.com
- 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*)
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:
productivity = hours_per_week * total_developers * (baseline + (1-baseline)/(avg_developers_per_office^ALPHA))
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.
But even taken a few steps further than "I need another monitor to increase productivity", and you're floating dangerously close to self-entitlement, and simple, pathetic whining.
At Yahoo, I distinctly remember a thread on devel-random where one employee, in a single post, complained about things like how ugly the color scheme of the walls were, the fact that buildings in Mercado had too many floors, so when he left work, he has to stop at all the floors, and that the parking lot had flies that would get stuck in his hair gel. He called Yahoo the "worst place in the world to work at" because of this. It was incredibly sickening how ridiculous the email was.
The employer-employee relationship is a balance. If it swings too far in one direction where the employees get their ass kissed every day, then you breed self-entitled spoiled brats that are intolerable to work with. If it swings too far towards the employer, you get a dictatorship. I've worked in both environments, and neither of them are any good.
But to quit because you think that monitors are a litmus test about the engineering culture is ridiculous and is more of a reflection on you than the engineering culture. If you have a problem, solve it like an adult. It sounds like the employee didn't even mention it to his boss until he left. (It also sounds like the boss didn't bother asking the employee at their 1:1's about what they thought needed changing, or maybe he was just unapproachable.) Maybe it was just an oversight, maybe they didn't have the money, who knows. Life in general is a lot easier if you're flexible and less of a prima donna and go with the flow. To keep quibbling over the minutiae and extrapolate that to mean something more than it is, to me, is more whining than anything else.
Developers acting like this, and getting away with it, should ring the bubble alarm bells. It's how it was in the 90s too.
Good management should be able to tell the difference between the two and at least score well on the productivity relevant ones. In my career I've been regularly surprised just how penny wise and pound foolish management can be in this regard.
IMO it's more important for the management to recognize and fulfill employee's real needs. Give people what they need before they ask for it. Because some would ask for wrong things (e.g., not knowing that the company can provide a better solution to their problem), and others will never ask for anything, continuing to suffer in silence.
I know this isn't the point of your comment, but I had to point out this recent study that begs to differ.
http://healthland.time.com/2012/05/17/coffee-drink-more-live...
I'm an owner / CTO of a consultancy, and this point always frustrates me. We are only 12 or so employees, and we're all very comfortable with one another (we'll have game nights at the office, watch the GSL, etc). Still, when me and my partner have a 1:1 or talk to the employees, about 80% of them will not tell us their concerns or things they need.
It's a huge problem for us - we are very interested in spending our money on benefits, etc. that people care about, rather than just guessing, but it's virtually impossible to do this. Story time:
We had a designer leave recently (I <3'd him, awesome guy) to go work somewhere else, and a huge part of his decision, in the exit interview, was about a difference in health insurance between the two places. We had met with him 2 months prior EXPLICITLY to ask him (and other employees) if they wanted us to pursue any changes to health insurance, and were universally told that our existing benefits in that regard were fine.
We have since modified our health insurance to be just fantastically good, because apparently this was a concern (and we've had to forego a few other things in order to be able to afford it). But the point is, this is a guy that I was friends with, and he just would not tell me what weight to give the health insurance benefit vector.
It's maddening because I'm a very data-driven guy, and for whatever reason I can't get good data on employee concerns to save my life. Does anyone have any pointers here?
1) Is he married or looking to get married? 2) Does he have kids or plan to have them soon? 3) Has he had any serious health issues in his family (e.g. history of heart disease)?
Obviously, those type of questions can get you in trouble if they are asked on an employer->employee basis. But in the course of really getting to know someone, those types of things will come up. It's then on you to think about what you'd want in that situation and do it for them.
So if ex-designer was planning on having kids, you might consider the cost of the family plan and be willing to splurge on that at the expense of the beer and snacks budget (or something focused on single people).
My main problems with employers have been their ignorance and/or lack of concern about what is important to me. I had one company that bragged about fully paying for our health insurance. Well, the owners of the company all had several kids. I didn't even have a girlfriend at the time. Health insurance as a young, healthy, single guy was barely even on my radar. That was easily accessible data (which they had), and yet they didn't act on it at all.
Simply, put yourself in their shoes and ask, "What would I want in this situation?" Considering you were friends with the ex-designer, my thought would be that you could have probably spent more time thinking about what he wanted instead of just asking. For some reason, many people won't speak up about what they want. Many times they themselves don't know until someone shows it to them.
My 2 cents.
Recently, I had surgery for an ACL tear. Unfortunately, for some reason, it later went septic. The day the consultant found it was septic he rushed me into surgery that afternoon and I spent the next 6 nights on IV antibiotics, followed by a course of oral antibiotics. At no point did I have to worry about how much all this cost - and I didn't ring BUPA just because I couldn't be bothered and it was all perfectly satisfactory care.
When I was a kid I had extremely bad asthma. A new respirator type device had just been invented and I was one of the first in the North West to have one. These things cost thousands of pounds at the time and there's no way my parents would have been able to afford it, but they got it loaned to them completely free. It quite possibly saved my life.
I used to think how lucky I was that I wasn't born in some third world country where I would probably not have survived, but recently I've started to be glad I wasn't born in the US.
You guys really need to sort this out.
One may argue that Europe went too far with their "social" expenses (hence, the current financial meltdown). Possibly. However, their view of healthcare (education, and other items) as a BASIC human right is one I strongly believe in. Healthcare should NOT be a luxury item. Yet, it is treated as such in the US. Almost exactly a year ago, I had a bike accident right off the Golden Gate Bridge. For 10 minutes I was limping my way to Sausalito until I happened to run into a police officer who thought I should be picked up by an ambulance to taken to the hospital (although they suspected that I had a concussion, broke my arm and shoulder, I came out with just scratches). I HAVE insurance, but for weeks after this injury, I was opening my mailbox at home, expecting a $20K bill (just the 15 minute ambulance ride was $2000). I was absolutely terrified. Imagine... and I HAVE insurance. Luckily, I ended up paying just a few co-pays, and the issue was resolved.
One of the benefits of a great employer in the US (like you have -- Microsoft, for example) is "Health insurance, Dental covered" etc. That's how they post it in job boards. Shouldn't health insurance be a given??
To your argument that things are settled through loans, etc: I am utterly against it. Obviously, statistics show that these things don't work. The hospital I work for serves an under-served population. People suffering from chronic diseases and who should be seeing a doctor on a regular basis do not. Why? Cost. They end up showing up in the ER with a MAJOR issue months later. Their condition is much more complicated to treat, and significantly costlier. So, we "saved" on a silly, cheap follow-up, but ended up spending a huge amount later. And guess what? These patients can't pay their bill anyhow, so we have to write the expense off.
I am familiar with quite a few people who would have loved to change their jobs, or even start their own business, but are too worried about losing their health insurance benefits. Is that the right way to go for the US? Probably not.
[edited: put it initially under the wrong parent. text left as is]
I'm not sure Greece in particular went too far, as such; isn't the problem that they've got a massive epidemic of tax evasion, and no political will to tackle it? If they were enforcing the tax laws on the books, maybe they'd have the money to pay for the services they're providing.
>So, we "saved" on a silly, cheap follow-up, but ended up spending a huge amount later. And guess what? These patients can't pay their bill anyhow, so we have to write the expense off.
Hear, hear.
One may argue that if she has no understanding of the European financial meltdown, and just wants to find evidence for the failure of the welfare state where there is none. The crisis happened primarily because of the Spanish real estate crisis, and it became exacerbated because of (1) structural flaws in the monetary union and (2) imposition of rapid austerity.
As for the rest, I agree.
There there. Relax. I was not arguing that the social measures were the only cause of the financial meltdown. They are, probably, a contributing factor. You brought up Spain, which in particular, I am quite familiar with due to personal relations with a Spanish. Real estate was the major factor (as it was in the US), that is true. However, when Spanish citizens tell me they show up at the ER for a sore throat because the ER is closer to work/fit their schedule/whatever instead of setting an appointment with a doctor, I think that's a big "social" expense that could and should be avoided. Why do they do that? Because it's free! So who cares, right? There's nothing wrong with providing free health insurance (and I'm a big advocate for it), but showing up to the ER without a reason should be penalized.
Also, when I hear that people who have no desire to work (because they're homemakers, for example) show up at the unemployment office simply to collect unemployment or just to be eligible to "fun" courses (to fill up their days), that's a social expense (in Spain, if you're unemployed, even for an extended period of time, the government will pay for all kinds of courses, be it knitting, accounting, or something else). Those are expenses that affect a country's well-being. I AM all for these things. But that's what I meant that they may have gone too far.
One thing I've noticed being an employee is that when employers try to get feedback in how to compensate their employees or what kind of perks they can additionally offer the question asked is usually, "Is there anything I can do to make you happy?" That question is vague and oftentimes sounds like it should be answered in the negative. The employee doesn't want to look needy of course. Instead, the employer should ask, "Hey, are you happy with your hardware? You've been messing a lot with databases lately. Do you have enough RAM? Do you want some extra disks to mess with different RAIDs or filesystems?" or maybe, "Do you think we should get developers a second monitor? I really don't mind spending the money, it just never occured to me until now that it might be useful." Once an employer actually opens up a dialogue with an explicit offer or idea, the feedback the employer wants to hear will much more likely flow naturally.
More specifically with a topic such as health insurance, I as an employee need to be given some idea of what options are on the table when it comes to "improving" my health insurance plan. Are we talking about the employer paying more of the insurance or perhaps am I concerned about the lack of a plan that offers an unlimited lifetime benefits clause.
I feel my job as an employee is to do work that adds value to the company. If the company wants to genuinely add value to my well-being, but wants it to be more thoughtful or mutually beneficial than a raise, the ball's in their court to be creative and come up with a list of starter ideas. Now I'm not averse to thinking of what would be useful, but a vague email, or even a 1 on 1 asking me what can be improved is unfortunately not going to get any feedback because my mind really won't turn its attention to thinking about that for the time necessary. A personal anecdote offered in lesson form:
A CEO of a startup may hold a discussion on company offered stock options, to fill in people on how it works on a compensation level. When questions come up that the CEO does not feel comfortable answering (considering he's not a certified accountant), a normal CEO will advise you to ask an accountant (accountant? I'm 22 years old, I don't have an accountant, should I take off work hours to find an accountant, go to an accountant and ask him/her?). A creative CEO will get an accountant in the office for a day and schedule those with questions to have a 1 on 1 meeting.
Honestly, it's enough of a skill that I can't give you "quick pointers"-but check out the book The Charisma Myth, and pay special attention to Focus Charisma. That's the skill that you need to get people to open up about all their problems & concerns.
That's a big load off my mind. Thanks for pointing this out :)
Okay. So now you're an employee who has been asked by his employer what he needs. Maybe you'd like higher pay/greater compensation. Do you have the bargaining power for greater pay? Would asking for greater pay indicate dissatisfaction to your employer? Maybe you don't want to communicate dissatisfaction. So maybe it's best to just say that everything is fine and keep working until you find a better position.
So maybe now you've found another position with more compensation. Do you hold a proverbial gun to your employer's head and say "greater compensation or I leave"? Is there any acceptable way of asking for more with no real way of promising anything in return?
I appreciate your efforts in trying to keep the lines of communication open, but maybe if you want information, you should give some in return. Something like "we still have $100k left to spend in employee benefits. How would you like this allocated? Pay? Insurance plan? Company party?" Or maybe you can offer choices. "Would you rather we increase 401k matching by 3%? Increase pay by 1%? etc" And obviously give them time to respond (so that they can consider things, discuss things, etc) It might be a pain, but if that's still not acceptable, and you still want more data, I doubt you'll get data asking directly from your employees what amounts to "do you want more stuff?" and "what more stuff do you want?".
If you find success with something though, whether it was something I suggested or not, please let us know!
You have to admit the color scheme was really bad.
And weren't there giant freaky spiders infesting the main campus?
My main memory of the main campus was (aside from the depressed-looking employees) the inexplicably birdshit-splattered sidewalks and pathways.
• Editor on one monitor, documentation on the other.
• More source code at once.
I mean, seriously, have you never run out of screen real estate when you have five source code files, a web inspector window, and a browser window open?
I can easily live with two, but there was a spare old monitor kicking about, so I absconded with it. With only one monitor, I spend a lot of clicking through the task bar trying to figure out what window I need next. With lots of monitors, I'm able to remain focused by just glancing back and forth between monitors.
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.
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.
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.
I was able to get a big external monitor but only after asking. It's not something that you're asked about when you start.
I don't work for a software or engineering company, and I enjoy the work, but I'd really like to be on a machine that really worked well for me and my needs. I really dislike Windows software in particular, and have found some real gems on OS X.
Too many companies try to nickle and dime IT spending. Saving a few hundred dollars or so on an employees machine isn't going to do you a lot of good if that means a lot of lost productivity.
The problem is that the people at the top often spend more time in meetings than working and only do email, PowerPoint, Word and Excel. They don't quite grasp how a better system could lead to more productivity, because their jobs aren't to produce things.
Of course, if you don't understand how your employees produce things, maybe you shouldn't be at the top.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
That said, I can certainly see a manager who asks upfront what I need to be productive as a good sign and an absolute refusal to consider such needs as a bad one.
Asking for and giving things that fit that description is common sense, not being an entitled whiner.
Just look at zedshaw. He works with a couple of junk linux laptops and a white macbook, and gets the shit done. The hardware doesn't matter that much, especially if you're doing your work in the terminal most any computer is fast enough.
I suspect though, that when it comes to guitars he has a little more equipment jones.
I used to work on a white macbook 1:st gen for years, but I bought a new mbp 15" a couple of years ago so that I could run vmware and not have the machine melt every time there was flash on a webpage.
In short, equipment doesn't matter that much (unless you're running an IDE), it's more important to take breaks and stay focused.
But if company not willing spend money (quite little in the long run) on equipment - this is a sign that this place is bad for engineers since management value engineers less than equipment.
Best Buy is selling 27" monitors for about $300 and 30" monitors for about $1,500. As a percentage of a full-time developer’s salary, depreciated over three years, $600 is pocket change and even $3,000 is defensible. So if a company is nickel-and-diming its developers over this kind of thing, what does that say about the overall attitude of the management?
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.)
My identity is with my personal email addresses. Company address is ephemeral and "throw-away" over the long haul.
Then I can be sure I'm getting what I need (which is, yes, two 27inch mons and a mb pro)
Plus given a blank cheque most of us wouldn't go wild, we understand what we need and skip the rest.
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.
(Mind you, at the company I run, employees get whatever they want, hardware-wise. Everyone seems to have settled on the 27" apple monitor + the laptop display.)
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Even our internal servers are called with strange names, //pictures being the main intranet for the studio :) It's all good...
The caveat of course, is be a reasonable adult and don't ask for a $50,000 gold-plated MacBook or something. As long as you can get more incremental value out of the hardware than it costs for us to get it for you, it's yours.
I think it all comes down to trust - as the article states, it's not about bigger monitors but the company trusting you to do the right thing.
Also, I don't have admin access to my computer. I'm forcibly handicapped.
How is it NOT geeky to have local mail parts in friggin' order?
Also, even if I had money to provide some hardware to people working for me, I'd call them whining b....s they are. We'll organically upgrade on neccesity and keep it lean at all times.
There are a lot of clueless companies and managers out there.
My wife interviewed with a company that was trying to hire a developer to commercialize their in house printing software. The hiring manager was surprised that developers aren't interested in working in a place with NO vacation the first year. He was also surprised that she was used to coming in and leaving at something besides 8:30 to 5:00 or (gasp!) leave the building for lunch at her previous job. I don't think the manager was a bad guy, just clueless.
The manager who calls his reports "whining..b" and would make them less productive to save a few bucks probably won't realize why he has a high churn rate or why candidates give his company a pass after the interview.
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'...
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.
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melissa@tellus$ whoami
melissa
Last login: Fri May 18 09:29:53 on ttys002
MelBook:~ melissa$ whoami
melissa
Projects.