Monitors for Work

Just started a new remote contracting gig and did a one-week on-site “getting to know each other” thing. I was shocked that everyone in the office had dual 27” 1080p monitors. Didn’t know they even made 1080p monitors that big!

Anyway after a week of staring at that blurry mess I was having eye focusing issues every night trying to read a book. Those monitors should be treated as ergonomic hazard. Total disgrace.

The only way to get an extra monitor during my first stint at AWS was to loot one from the desk of a departing colleague (before IT got their hands on it). Fortunately there was no shortage of departing colleagues.

If you are working with text a monitor with high pixel density is important. 4K 27” is good for Windows, 5K 27” is great for Macs. I think companies should provide a monitor of this calibre and a laptop powerful enough to easily drive them to technical workers. I would spend my own money on the hardware if I could use it for work. It’s like if a company said they will give you a $5000 pay raise, but you have to use a 2006 flip phone from now on. I think a lot of people would refuse the raise.

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.

TBH 27" is a sweet spot for me, I feel overwhelmed with 32″ screen. 4k to get a retina like quality, which makes text more comfortable to read.

In 2016 I bought a $700 40in curved 4k monitor for my job at Amazon. It's funny they probably spent over $1500 on a laptop I almost never used but did not want to pay for a decent monitor.

First job I had was a pair-programming shop that outfitted each station with a 27" iMac and a 27" Cinema display (along with two sets of mice and keyboards).

Second job was remote, so I outfitted my own home office. I upgraded from a 34" 21:9 monitor to a 32:9 monster and enjoyed having the equivalent of 2x27" monitors.

I've since upgraded that setup to add a 28" LG DualUp to the left side of my 32:9 ultrawide. It strikes a nice balance of a productivity display for calendar/email and one for my main workspace that's plenty wide for spreadsheets (because I write less code than spreadsheets for FinOps modeling work).

I'm a huge fan of wider aspect ratios beyond 16:9 or 16:10. The dream is a 32:10 monitor in tandem OLED.

when will we just understand that everyone has an individual way of working?

no one can claim a specific monitor or tool is universally "correct" - that's crazy

Many good points, and I largely agree.

But for developers and designers working on user-facing software: I recommend keeping at least one poor to profoundly shitty monitor in your setup. Both resolution and color rendering accuracy matter here.

If you have everyone on fancy MacBooks and excellent high end monitors, you will tend to miss defects in your design that will affect your customers - things like poor color contrast (I don’t think the accessibility tools care about contrast of non-text elements), elements that are too thin to be seen comfortably or lead to weird aliasing, etc.

Microsoft famously made this mistake with their Fluent UI design (or some version of it); 1px borders with huge corner radii that ended up looking “cut off” on standard corporate monitors (like the ones 99.999% of their target audience are subjected to).

P.S. to have some empathy for the corporate IT department, if they are handing out Dell laptops to thousands of people, up until relatively recently they very likely would struggle to handle two or sometimes even one 4K monitor. And Windows high DPI handling is a potentially huge support burden if there is any sort of diversity in the software in use.

Edit: turns out the author themselves wrote about how painful good/4K monitors could be to use. Apparently it was essentially unusable for them in late 2019, although that doesn’t match my personal experience - I was using 4K monitors in windows with only occasional issues as early as 2018. https://etbe.coker.com.au/2019/11/18/4k-monitors/

The happiest I have ever been with my monitors was with 2x 24 inch 1440 displays (dell s2421sgf) - it’s not an IPS display but it’s a single panel high refresh rate with solid software support and good color mapping. I calibrated it and it was worse than my MacBook but only slightly.

Unfortunately they appear to have a shelf life of about 6 years and the panels are no longer made…

existence or absence of drama around getting the right equipment is usually a very strong indicator of technical leadership quality.

One nice aspect of WFH is that it addresses this problem. You get a laptop and $500-1500 for hardware and many places you get it again after an interval (1-3 years).

Teams still does not make it easy to share your screen when you have a non-standard size. Have to either make the receiver deal with the size mismatch, or share a single window at a time. I have to maintain a 1080p monitor on the side just to have a convenient place to host a screen share.

Come on, Microsoft, please. I would even take a vibe-coded, crap solution that only works on Tuesdays.

Larger monitors are inversely correlated with productivity

Especially a second monitor. Often just used for watching youtube videos during work

Recently I’ve often wondered if LLM productivity gains (for coding) could end up mirroring the productivity gains of a good monitor setup.

That is, table stake on the one hand (nobody likes to work for a company stingy enough to refuse to buy one or two more screens per worker), but also not obviously more productive either (it is not easy to measure the productivity gain of a monitor setup and most developers who are productive with it will also be productive without).

If LLMs do not bring a lot more value to the company than providing a good monitor setup to every tech employee, this is a clue that once the bubble pops AI expenses should not be priced very differently than a bunch of screens (~700$ per worker per three years?)

I have two Apple Studio monitors and a max-ram MacBook Pro. Work only paid for the MBP and only after I jumped through the necessary hoops, which I was happy to do. Had they not, I would have just dropped the $6k myself. One time I did drop the $6k myself and then showed my manager. Show don’t tell. He expensed it for me.

A company would be foolish to buy everyone this gear. I buy it because it makes a difference for me , my eyes and my patience. When I was a kid, I had a 12” TV, not even a monitor. I’m not a kid anymore more. I think of it as a professional buys their own tools.

One of many questions at the interview will be asking what hardware they offer and what furniture. I had PTSD from sitting on a cheap office chair and developed massive back pain. If there isn't at least Herman Miller, anything else doesn't matter.