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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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?

[1] Left handed mouse settings, for example.

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.

Lucky. I do front-end dev, so it really helps to have my website & the PSD I'm working off of side-by-side.

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 think it should be both. It's a lot harder to see stuff from a distance. Put it in front of me, please.

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.

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