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Comment by freddie_mercury | Hacker News Reader

> I've personally been in companies that could easily double the productivity of their developers at the one-time per-developer cost of one developer salary, by buying a decent computer, extra monitor, a pair of headphones and a good chair.

This is completely pervasive myth in places like HN.

I founded a startup. For the first three months we hadn't signed a lease for real office space, so there were no monitors, crappy chairs, and old laptops.

Three months later we had all the things.

Productivity did not improve. It absolutely did not double. (It is a bit insane to even claim that it could.)

Those things do not improve productivity in any meaningful way. At worst they are just status symbols. At best they are just signalling. "My company values me and I know that because I have two monitors". Their actual impact on productivity is minimal, despite the thousands of HN posts claiming otherwise.

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And I counter that with my personal experience because I've been at this job long enough that I notice things that are really, really distracting me from doing my job. Like:

- sitting in a hot, airless room will drop my productivity to much less than half; I'll be spending most of the day angry and trying to fight sleepiness

- a computer that can barely run a browser and an IDE at the same time will operate slower than I think, and will introduce distractions and annoyance every time I have to wait 15 seconds for the page to reload

- having just one display is bearable (I'm used to it), but having two significantly cuts down on switching between programs, removing those small delays add up over the day (incidentally, adding a third display is marginal for me; I find myself not using it very much - I usually dock IMs and project logs there)

Few years ago I actually had all three issues simultaneously at the same company. I complained until they were resolved, and only then I started to feel that it's me who's the limiting factor in my productivity. As it should be.

Quality of shoes don't exactly matter when you are running away from fire. Unfortunately that's how the start up analogy works.

Quality of shoes matter if you work at a garage or car wash, or may be even if you are a professional fire fighter.

Its one thing to say 'My firefighters came out fine in the building fire wearing bad shoes.' totally a different thing to say 'Bad shoes need to be provided to firefighters.'

You won't see an improvement in productivity but I would take a look at employee health, satisfaction and retention.

I founded a startup too, and my intuition (early on) would have been to agree with you. But it's wrong.

Big things are easy to notice because they're big. Little things are difficult to notice because they're little. Doubly so if they aren't immediate.

In my experience the little things are at least as important to productivity as the big things.

Why did you waste your money on unnecessary real estate, monitors, and chairs, if no one needed them?

Why not sell that stuff and hand out cash bonuses to employees?

I've often chosen to stay later at work or to go to the office at weekends to be able to work on my two monitors and desktop pc rather than try to get work done on my laptop at home.

For certain tasks my laptop feels like a huge hindrance in productivity.

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