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jbgreertoday at 6:26 PM1 replyview on HN

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.


Replies

nightshift1today at 10:30 PM

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.