How do you improve the productivity of software
developers?
An answer I've given regularly for many years now, and
one that applies to almost anyone who uses a computer, is give them
a bigger screen. I used to raise eyebrows fifteen years ago by recommending that
every developer should work on a 21 inch screen. These days I say
that everyone should have at least two 20 inch screens. Why is this important? If I have a small screen I can't see as
much at once, so to see different things I have to keep popping
windows to the front. With my two screens I can put a whole bunch of
stuff on the screen at once and all I have to do is move my
head. My eyes can flick between the text I'm typing now in Emacs and
the rendered result in firefox. I can keep open an IDE with lots of
subwindows and have documentation in a browser right there. I don't
have look around on the task bar to see where I put that terminal
window, I just mouse and type. It's
often hard to imagine the improvement before you try, but I can
really feel the difference since I doubled my screen. And it's not as expensive as most people think. Chatting with a
friend I looked up the price for my twin Samsung 204Bs - $700 for
the pair at my local circuit city. Developers are expensive, it
doesn't take much to recover that kind of cost (Hmmm, there's room
on my desk for a third.) Too often these days I see pair programming done on laptops with
low and small screens. This is silly, big screens make a wise
investment.
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