As a corollary, I've found that salary is a good indicator of how good a company's culture is. Not because of the actual money of course (money doesn't buy happiness, blah blah blah), but because a company that pays its engineers more generally values its engineers more. Most of the "hip" companies with good culture (FB, Google, Palantir) pay quite well, whereas other companies associated with a bad culture (which I will not name) tend to pay poorly. Not always true, of course, but a good heuristic.
Why Quit? Because the other company has bigger monitors.
121–130 of 250 posts
Re: Why Quit? Because the other company has bigger monitors.
#122I think the meta-point sort of makes sense. Places that don't skimp on resources which are a comparatively small fraction of salary (monitors, fancy coffee makers, catered food, etc...) are more likely to value their employees. That said: I use a single 15.6" laptop on a stand (or, of course, in my lap) for pretty much everything I do. I find the added productivity of always having everything I work on in front of me…
I have two 24" screens in front of me at work and use all of the screen real estate. One monitor (the one directly in front of me) is for my terminal, controlled by tmux. Most of my windows in tmux are split into panes, with the exception tending to be vim (I use vim's inbuilt panes systems). The other monitor has a browser, skype, office, and performance monitoring apps.
Re: Why Quit? Because the other company has bigger monitors.
#123The monitors, I totally understand and agree with. That's about actual productivity. But choosing your own e-mail address? There must be a thousand little details like that in my life, every day, that I have no control over, like the color of my desk, or the sound of a coworker's voice. By all means, try to find a workplace that suits you the best, but if a seemingly tiny detail like that bothers you so much, unless…
At one job, I used my usual email (tedu@), until the new IT director decided it wasn't corporate enough, and I got tunangst@. Within days, I started getting emails from recruiters playing guess the email based on my linkedin profile, which I had never received before.
Self-correcting problem!
Re: Why Quit? Because the other company has bigger monitors.
#124At my place, you get name.surname@mycompany.com and can have as many aliases as you want, I don't care - I'll always send you mail to name.surname@mycompany.com.
How is it NOT geeky to have local mail parts in friggin' order?
Also, even if I had money to provide some hardware to people working for me, I'd call them whining b....s they are. We'll organically upgrade on neccesity and keep it lean at all times.
Re: Why Quit? Because the other company has bigger monitors.
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get a boatload of spam daily. On gmail.
Did you turn off or otherwise adjust spam filtering? Otherwise, I don't believe you. At my last job (large, successful startup) I got the wildcard mail and got close to zero spam. Gmail spam filtering definitely works very well.
Who cares about how much it filters out? The question is how much false positives does it have? And google most definitely are not good enough to even be usable in that department. If you never know if you've missed something you have to constantly check the filtered mails as well, making the spam filtering much worse than nothing.
If you rely on something as blunt as gmail spam filtering you don't take emailing seriously.
Re: Why Quit? Because the other company has bigger monitors.
#126The monitors, I totally understand and agree with. That's about actual productivity. But choosing your own e-mail address? There must be a thousand little details like that in my life, every day, that I have no control over, like the color of my desk, or the sound of a coworker's voice. By all means, try to find a workplace that suits you the best, but if a seemingly tiny detail like that bothers you so much, unless…
I've gotten lastname.firstname2@... before. It was a (brief) nightmare.
Re: Why Quit? Because the other company has bigger monitors.
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nowadays web email services like Gmail set the minimum standard for how email should work. You should be able to choose your email address from what's available, and also create new email addresses whenever you need them (with self service). If the corporate email system cannot provide service that is as good, then people will start using services like Gmail instead. I see it happen all the time. Personally I also re…
I have heard it many times here and elsewhere, but customized email addresses are a huge boon for having your own domain that I'm discovering.
I have one for my wife, son, and I. It makes life so easy when people ask for an email address and I say firstname@firstnamelastname.com (and my surname is really short and really common). Invariably, some think you are some sort of uber hacker because you pay $7/year for this service.
Re: Why Quit? Because the other company has bigger monitors.
#128I too fall for the big monitor fallacy, I like running an external monitor at high rez. One screen with a web browser and the other with a split terminal vim split in 2-4 panes. But it's really just moat. I could do well with just one terminal and a little better short-term memory. If I work focused and take breaks, I can work with just one terminal window @ fullscreen, control-z for task management and a web browser…
That really does depend on your code base. If you have some large 1 million line C++ codebase that your computer fails to index half the time and compiles that take 20 minutes minimum; you need the 27" resolution to view all the panes of a running program at the same time; a better machine and larger screens are very useful.
Re: Why Quit? Because the other company has bigger monitors.
#129The email comment makes no sense. If someone is so adamant they need a specific email address, what else will they be unreasonable about? I'm more interested in whether the company does everything possible to make the office a place you never want to leave. The right equipment for every job should be default. Food follows closely after, followed by nontraditional work spaces. Some of my best work is done either stand…
Well, you shouldn't compromise on any of those if they're important to you. And if you don't care about your username, then great, one less thing to have to worry about. But I think for anyone that does care about their username, it's a sign of respect when the company lets you choose it, and a sign -- not the end-all, but a sign -- of trouble ahead if they can't, and the OP's point is valid. (The thing about large m…
Well said Matt, thanks
Re: Why Quit? Because the other company has bigger monitors.
#130I am productive using my 15 inch Macbook Pro. They offered me a Samsung 23 inch monitor but the quality was poorer than my MBP's screen, and it looked cheap and not very elegant to share the same deskspace.