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Importance, or lack of work contribution? Smaller screen = works less.
Importance as in payment, probably
They’ll say that their work is mainly talking to other people
Which is why they believe AI is the future.
It does everything they do.
Produce slop
Disgusting.
Well, if the company gets fined for mismanaging or committing fraud, who do you think they will fire?
A scapegoat is very important.
who do you think they will fire?
10 to 20 percent of the workforce, so the CEO still can get a bonus.
Exactly. This is America. 40% and install AI if it’s 2025 or later.
Yuuuup. My last company let go of 20% in a single round of layoffs
My last company
So you were part of the 20%? Or did you just nope tf out?
I read the writing on the wall and jumped ship
The job of people around the CEO is primarily to make decisions. All this huge chain of managers is needed only to aggregate information so that the CEO can make an informed decision. This is how many large companies operate. I would even say that there is a direct correlation between the size of the campaign and the number of monitors at the bottom.
The flip side of sitting behind a huge monitor is that you won’t stay outside with a huge number of your employees if you make the wrong decision. It’s just a different job.
Your description is basically of a “spherical CEO in a vacuum”, ie. the ideal and abstract version of how corporations should operate. It has very little to do with reality
Well, I can only write from my own experience. I’ve worked for several major campaigns in my life. In banks, in telecom operators. And it’s almost always been like this. And where there was none, the campaign collapsed. Not in a moment, of course, because campaigns, like people, do not die instantly, but age and degrade. But as a result, it was.
Have you worked with very many CEOs at SMEs? Based on my experience it seems to match the description, by and large.
I’ve been a C-suite executive, and I’ve worked with executives (incl. CEOs) at public companies.
Not only is there often a thermocline of truth that stops “bad” information going up the chain, CEOs more often than not make decisions based on nothing but their own opinions, and they will more than happily discard any information that doesn’t already fit that opinion, and even if negative things do manage to reach them from the other side of the thermocline, they often discount it or explain it away
True for the phone and tablet, but for any sort of computer that is not true
I work on a laptop with virtual desktops and I am much more productive that way than with a big screen… Or two big screens.
Everything is in the center of my field of view, I know which VD of my 3x3 grid holds what. It’s much more efficient for me than bigger screens could ever be. And that is not for lack of trying!
It just depends on the person.
Grid VDs club. Although I only use 2x2 because toggle up/down/righ/left is complicated enough for my brain.
VDs arranged in a grid ? Why ?
Faster switch. Think each column being 1-3 and each row as A-C
B2 is my terminals, B3 is my IDE, B1 is a secondary IDE (for instance, DataGrip), C row is browser windows, A1-2 is temporary, not often used windows, A3 is communication apps. I mostly use A3, B2-3 and C2-3. It’s all mapped in my head so I can instantly switch to whichever VD I need.
That’s impressive
Personally I never needed more than 5 desktops, and I don’t think I could remember what I put on more desktops
Haha that’s fair
Although it’s a habit thing. Most of these are fixed, I never switch them to a different position. So the only ones I have to remember is A1-2 if I am using them, the rest is as easy as knowing where your glasses are stored in your cupboards.
You just changed how I think about virtual screens. I feel like Khan being unloaded on by Kirk.
I decided long ago that I liked the single monitor with multiple desktops. But in my head they have always been a line of desktops instead of a grid.
Somewhere there is a mathematician who uses a hyper cube array of desktops…
When I discovered it can be arranged in a grid, it made VDs so much more useful.
Cause a line of the same amount of VDs (9)… Ugh, not fun haha
Even though you can map each to a shortcut, it’s still tougher to use than a grid with directional shortcuts!
How do you have your shortcuts set up for this? And if you don’t mind me asking, what desktop environment / window manager are you using?
I am using KDE’s Plasma 6 as a DE with Wayland. The compositor (window managers are a Xorg thing) is KWin
The shortcuts I use are Meta+Up/Down/Left/Right. I can’t remember if they’re default or if I set them this way.
Those should be the defaults, yeah.
Ctrl+Alt+↑/↓/←/→
It’s the same thing. The workers work, management just makes sure the workers work.
I feel wrong.
I have an iPhone, and a laptop and 2 screens.
That’s four screens total. You’re first on the chopping block.
Fact is, in my company, higher ups have more screens than me. Like phone, desktop, couple monitors and huge wall monitor.
Maybe your company is a statistical outlier
Hello my brother/sister/velociraptor/etc in screens. We’re worthless together 💖
I have three monitors. FUCK.
I have eight. 🤡
Most monitors has got to be the security guard’s CCTV, so it does track!
Same. No wonder I’m burnt out. The human brain can only handle so many screens at the same time :/
and yet… if it’s a company that’s a bit slack on security, the right command in the right place by someone with 2 monitors can kill the company dead.
A few well placed commands by a few lowly 2 monitor types are always the kind of things that derail companies on a fundamental level.
What senior management always forget is that they need us vastly more than we need them…
If all the two-monitor people get up and walk out, the company stops.
You can lose any other single rung there and still push on.
My spouse and I work for a contractor that is having trouble hiring experienced people like us, so they have been hiring fresh grads outta school. There is a limited pool of experience here, so when management throws a fit one of us is overloaded or gets sick and can’t meet the budget or deadline, it ends with nothing because they can’t afford to lose us. We work on the power grid and it’s a relatively small pool of engineers doing the work we do. Also, I’m rocking two work laptops with a home setup of 4 monitors and an office setup of 3, but still feel pretty important!
Its almost as if the more real work you do, the less you matter.
I wonder what would happen if the higher up in a company you get, the less you got payed. I’d imagine more actual work would be accomplished.
It saddens me the fact that there are people out there wanting to do more work.
The game is rigged. Do nothing and get paid.
Hi, it’s me. Two Monitor Man.
Oh fuck, I have 5 27-32” monitors, phone, 2 laptops and a wall TV. Based on this I’m half fired already.
Why would anyone fire someone who works so much for so little?
That’s at least 9 separate jobs right there!
Are you sure you’re not a NOC?
“Importance™”
Compensation is inversely proportional to productivity.
The amount of screen size reflects the amount of work you do. So a smaller size has become a status signal. Showing you do not actually work.
You make do meetings
This is true up until a point, and then the pattern starts to reverse. Like, the receptionist isn’t going to get 2 monitors. They’re likely to get one monitor and a very old desktop, or an old laptop.
Edit: Also an intern / co-op student / work experience student, etc. is probably as low as you can go on the totem pole of office work. I bet in many cases they’re not even assigned a permanent office / cubicle since they’re expected to shadow / be mentored by a variety of people. As a result, they probably get a second-hand, used laptop.
And, if the company has retail sales, techs who do installations, etc. they’re often very low on the totem pole, and they’re often not getting a computer at all. Maybe in some cases they’d get a “work phone”, so they’d have the same kind of equipment as the CEO, but effectively be at the opposite end of the pole from them.
And sometimes you have techbro CEO who has like a video wall for no particularly good reason.
Sometimes, rich people like to cosplay being poor and unimportant.
It’s like, I have a 13" laptop, a 15" inch one, and two monitors at my desk with a dock… But so the my director… Actually, he doesn’t have the 13" one! Am I actually the director?
Which do you use most often?
A CEO might have a nice desktop, but is always out playing golf and so mostly uses his phone.
Kinda reminds me this Game one plays in Theatre which is to Play The Status (you’re given a number between 1 and 10, with 1 having the lowest social status and 10 the highest, and you try and act as such a person).
Alongside the whole chin-down to chin-up thing, people tend to do more fast and confident moving the higher the status, but the reality is that whilst indeed up the scale in professional environment the higher the status the more busy and rushed they seem, the trully highest status people (the 10s) don’t at all rush: as I put it back then (this was the UK) “the Queen doesn’t rush because for everybody the right time for the Queen to be somewhere is when she’s there, even it it’s not actually so, hence she doesn’t need to rush”.
There was also some cartoon making the rounds many years ago about how people on a company looked depending on their social status, were you started with the unkept shabbily dressed homeless person that lived outside the vuilding, and as you went up the professional scale people got progressively more well dressed and into suits and such, and then all of a sudden a big switch, as the company owner at the top dressed as shabbily as the homeless person.
There are exceptions. My ex CEO and his nepo kids demanded ultrawides so they could more efficiently watch Fox News and get scammed by horny MILFS in their area that want to hook up NOW.
Apparently I’m off the end of the chart. My last workplace set up had:
- primary 15" laptop with two external monitors (so 3 screens in use simultaneously)
- secondary 15" laptop with external monitor (so another 2 screens) when the primary one was tied up doing heavy processing (I was lucky and managed to hold onto my previous laptop when we did the usual rounds of device upgrades whereas most people just returned them to IT to be retired, so I had a spare that I could readily take home for WFH days without messing with my main office setup)
- a standalone PC monitor (for automation stuff, so the screen was there just for monitoring as needed)
You are actually the chart itself.
The all-too-common Load bearing IT
Damn, according to the chart, I bet you were working over time and logging in on weekends.
I avoided overtime like the plague since my employer didn’t like to deal with it (so if circumstances required me to work overtime my supervisor was pretty good about allowing me to take it as time in lieu the following week), but unfortunately there were definitely times where I had to log in on the weekend (the challenge of having customers that require support 7 days a week).
CRT = cafeteria worker
