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Do Developers Really Need a Second Monitor?
jammag writes "It was an agonizing moment: a developer arrived at work to realize his second monitor had been taken (given to the accounting dept., to add insult to injury). Soon, the wailing and the gnashing of teeth began. As this project manager recounts, developers feel strongly — very strongly — about needing a second monitor (maybe a third?) to work effectively. But is this just the posturing of pampered coders, or is this much screen real estate really a requirement for today's developers?"
Ten points if you read this post on your second monitor like I did!
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
When debugging a web-app I find it infinitely easier to have my terminal windows open on one monitor with the code and logs and then use the second monitor for my browsers so I can actually see things *as they happen* instead of trying to do lots of switching.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
The company down the street seems quite happy to shell out another $200-$300 to keep that $120,000/year developer happy. If your developer is any good, maybe he'll just go work for them.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The second monitor is extremely useful for keeping a browser open for reading Slashdot while I 'work.'
Even simpler, the search&removal, the complains, the complain handling: all probably have cost more than another monitor....
That accounting department might really have needed it.
I *don't* code, I build spreadsheets for a government finance office. Usually I'm translating a spreadsheet that's been helpfully locked into .pdf form by another government agency back into a usable spreadsheet, and being able to glance back and forth without sacrificing the full screen view is sanity preserving.
I'd wager anyone that uses a computer for work would benefit from a second monitor.
The real issue, as I see it, is that Accounting needed a monitor so instead of ordering one they took it from an employee that already had one. To the submitter of the story, as a project manager, why aren't you removing the developer's obstacles? Using a term like "wailing" makes it pretty clear what you think of the lowly developer on a personal level, but why are you asking us if they really need it instead of enabling him/her to do their job as they see fit?
More Twoson than Cupertino
You can never have too much screen space as a developer. It is that simple. Even if it to run the Debugger in one and the application in the other. As many people pointed out that a monitor costs what? $150? $200? That is how many hours of pay for the Developer?
Even worrying about it a clear case of Penny Wise Pound foolish.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
You use an LCD Screen! Poofta!
I develop HTML5 based robotic heart surgery machines running on top of jQuery beneath AJAX served by node.js off of an Amazon mounted Rackspace Cloud written in Clojure, and I've had it with LCD Screens, CRTs, and so-called editors.
On even days I punch my code into an ASR-33, and on odd days, I just toggle the code directly into the main memory. And on transcendental days, I use very fine magnets and rearrange the domains on the hard drive.
So don't you get all hoity toity to me about your ability to code with only one screen! You're a bloody wanker is what you are!
So do "developers" need a second monitor? Probably not.
No, probably not... unless they run a debugger on their code, or read documentation, or want to compare two different source files to one another, etc.
Look, monitors cost ~$200 once. Programmers cost ~$80,000/year. Just buy the second monitor.