Unlike carpentry, the quality of our tools (keyboard and monitor, specifically) don't affect the quality of our output.

I think in many cases, people hide the fact that they're not competent with high-cost professional tools, because laymen use it as a proxy for talent that they cannot evaluate.

I think that's also why many exceptional programmers just use a 5-year old laptop -- they don't need to compensate.

A day-trader having 12 monitors mounted on the wall doesn't make him profitable.