Comment by jbgreer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jbgreer | Hacker News Reader

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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.

Every time I’ve worked at a company where teams started picking their own hardware and expensing it, it ended like this. It usually started with reasonable orders, but once some teams notice that expensing hardware is working they try to push the limits of what they can get away with.

Ended up with weird situations like software and accounting people rocking those ultra expensive Apple cinema displays while sitting in their new Aeron chairs at their motorized standing desks which were always in the sitting down position.

Then someone gets shocked by the office expense line item at quarterly review time and cuts it off for everyone to try to balance out those expenditures for the rest of the year.

So we’d have a few people in the office with tricked out workstations and high end gear and then everyone else was on the same generic monitor and chair that was decided for the whole company long ago.

Even the most generous company I worked for that made a point of supporting engineer’s workstations eventually had to cut it off and standardize because the purchases were getting unjustifiable. There was also a lot of stuff like nice monitors or computer upgrades “disappearing” where you couldn’t really pin blame on anyone, because it was actually common for people to swap hardware around.

The only sustainable solution I’ve seen is when engineering gets together and argues for a reasonable set of computer gear and also a phased upgrade plan that doesn’t involve one giant expenditure in a single quarter.

Yeah we had the same thing. We had one person choose a massive curved ultra wide screen and then decide they didn’t like it so it sat in the hall beside their office for 6 months.

> the only sustainable solution I’ve seen is when engineering gets together and argues for a reasonable set of computer gear and also a phased upgrade plan

Design by committee doesn’t work IMO, and the phased upgrade plan works until bob decides that Fred got a new PC and wants the new GPU or feels stung by the fact that he got an older model by virtue of being upgraded 6 months earlier.

The only way I’ve seen it work is when engineering accept that they don’t need the absolute latest and greatest, and the directors plus agreeing on rolling stock upgrades. On my last team, I had someone argue with me that they needed a GPU upgrade from previous gen flagship to current gen flagship, when our game didn’t even require the tier below their current card to develop. They had the newest workstation of any team member at the time.

I think that providing modern monitors that make sense is probably the easiest way to please employees. No matter how excellent the salary is, if they are stuck working on old, small, blurry, faded screens, they'll be unhappy. It also gives a bad impression of the company as a whole. I did L1 tech support a long time ago, and people were overwhelmingly happy to see me coming to replace their old CRTs with LCDs.

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