A sobering reminder of where some businesses are at in 2018... 1280x1024

[WJA96]

Only our boxes have extended support, 5 years next day call out to be precise. Monitors are just your standard 1 year RTB warranty. We expect our users to plug them in, we rarely attend to hook up a screen.

So all that means is you have no hardware support on site and you’re hopefully making a cost saving from that.

What I was trying to explain in my original post was how many big institutions pay for hardware and software support through a large contracting company who charge you once to buy something but that seemingly exorbitant fee covers installation and lifetime support for the device. Hence it’s not actually that exorbitant. But the contracting company also want to make a profit, so they’ll charge as much as they can.

I have worked places where IT haven’t actually done hardware installs on things like monitors and you end up with 24” screens running at 1024 x 768 because the user used the existing VGA cable and didn’t know how to change the screen settings manually. It depends on whether or not you can afford to have a user without a machine for days or weeks while the RTB warranty works it’s way through.

I don’t do large companies but most of the small companies I support (and all the private individuals) want very high uptime figures so I generally build a lot of redundancy into my quotes. I did a home system install for a footballer in Macclesfield and I literally put two of everything in (including 2 leased lines and 2 4G modems) with failover and 4 hours of UPS so his network would have as close to 100% uptime as possible, even during a power-cut. On one level, that’s mental. But on the other hand, he was just doing exactly what most IT people would do if money wasn’t an object. And I never have to go there at 20 minutes notice either...

 

[WJA96]

Or anything else. £1000 to replace a broken thing or £200 ten times over a period of time to keep patching it up until being forced to replace it...well, £200 is less than £1000 so that's a saving, right? Costs cut, therefore a "success".

Actually, yes. It depends on your business priorities. When people come into my office and ask for something based on a saving, I sometimes ask them to underwrite it out of their own pocket.

So let’s take the original example of someone spending thousands on overtime rather than implement a productivity improvement. And I’ll say “yes, I’ll approve your new monitor or faster PC or whatever but from now on, I don’t pay overtime” and it’s pretty unusual for people to take me up on the offer.

Likewise, if I replaced capital equipment every time it broke down rather than repaired it, any company I worked with would be bust. Again, every 3-12 months most well run companies have a budget review and they can put in requests for capital equipment purchases based on a justified argument. If the argument makes sound business sense then generally that budget gets approved. And then there are plenty of companies who aren’t profitable and won’t spend cash flow on anything because they’re only just keeping their heads above water financially. That’s a whole other discussion.

 

[Angilion]

[..] Likewise, if I replaced capital equipment every time it broke down rather than repaired it, any company I worked with would be bust.

But would you replace it after being told that a lasting repair was impossible and you would be incurring a higher cost (and greatly increased downtime) by repeated patch-up repairs after repeated failures than you would by replacing it?

 

[WJA96]

But would you replace it after being told that a lasting repair was impossible and you would be incurring a higher cost (and greatly increased downtime) by repeated patch-up repairs after repeated failures than you would by replacing it?

It depends.

Do I have lots of cashflow?
Is the repair cost a significant proportion of the value of the item?

I suppose if the repair cost is 51% or greater of the replacement cost, I’d probably replace it.

Motors is absolutely full of threads from people who make a virtue out of bodging something to keep their car running when common sense would say get a new radiator/gearbox/car - so it’s not an uncommon issue

 

[GhostWKD]

And sadly, one massive reason people don’t get given big screens is simple workplace politics. The bosses have the mega-screens (sometimes 3 or 6 screen arrays) and the lowest paid workers (apprentices) get the crappy old stuff. For general office staff or junior management to get a big screen usually requires an overwhelming use-case. And even then most management just won’t sign it off. You do see managers playing politics with their whole department’s IT and you can sometimes be lucky and trigger an IT arms race between departments where everybody is running £4000 MacBook Pro’s with 43” 5K monitors, but those are very few and far between.

Sadly see this far too often. I work in Analytics so generally the better the PC the quicker I can get stuff done and some of the visualisation/data dumps are massively helped by larger screens. But people see larger screens as the newer/better thing regardless of if it is needed for their role...

I once had twin 23" screens which were taken from my desk by someone over a weekend. They got replaced with some lovely 19" screens (4:3 to make it even worse) but luckily my boss was on board with replacing them as she understood the work I do. When they were replaced numerous people sat near our team started complaining about favoritism of me and my team. I can only imagine the uproar if they realized that with the SSD IT fitted my laptop boots up 6x quicker than theirs heh

Edit: As many others have said also, the cost of replacing my crappy 23" screens was crazy - about £1,200. I tried to buy myself 2x 28" screens and expense them at £300 instead but sadly policy dictated otherwise.

 

[Terminal_Boy]

Ericsson was running Windows NT on low-end Toshiba laptops when I left in 2008. IT support was outsourced and very painful to use.

 

[krooton]

The problem for most people is they can’t demonstrate a return on investment.

If your company has a 6-month payback period for investment and the monitor you actually want costs £1000 then you have to show that you would save £1000 or generate £1000 in extra income through efficiencies. So if you get paid £500/week (gross) you would need to be 9% faster or more efficient to justify the cost. Even if the payback is over 12 months you still need to be 5% more efficient, which is pretty hard in most workplaces these days. So fundamentally the payback doesn’t exist.

Really depends on the role.

I have dual 24" 1080p monitors at work.
If I work from home, I have to use the 1600x900 screen on my laptop.

My productivity easily more than halves when I work from home, to the point that I actively come in to the office even if I don't have to.

I have also set everyone up in the department so that they can dual-screen with their laptop, and they all see massive gains in productivity.

5% is nothing if you are starting from a gimped position. Literally save at least 3 minutes doing something that would take an hour, and you are hitting that 5%.

 

[JoshR1989]

Ericsson was running Windows NT on low-end Toshiba laptops when I left in 2008. IT support was outsourced and very painful to use.

I work in telecoms infrastructure and for a technological industry the IT support and equipment is laughable to say the least.

 

[arrkaye]

Yeh my old company used to use a supplier called *** would totally rob them blind. Why? - because *** would invoice them and give them 60 days to pay. They were so terrible, if they couldn't source it, they would just Amazon Prime the item to us directly, with a big markup.

(Asterisks added)

 

[chroniclard]

Luckily I work in a small IT company and get to use pretty reasonable stuff.

 

[233]

even in basic office environments desktop real estate will yield a huge increase in productivity.
we run a small taxi company and multi displays make life so much easier for any sort of work.

christ my macbooks in for repair atm and i'm struggling going back to 1080p over retina

 

[Shocky-FM]

It was only two years ago that my firm was using 1280x1024, I'm sure there are some people still using them, no idea why.

Now they're all 1920*1080 but everyone gets two or more displays depending on the need.

I have four because I can.

 

[Vexr]

On revisiting this thread - @WJA96 - Have you considered running for political office? Sounds like you could talk up a case justifying £100 for a simple screwdriver or power cable.

I stand by my statement that companies are getting fleeced for monitors, as per my original example and many others saying the same on this thread. They require next to no maintenance, support, or replacement. The lack of realisation that screen real estate impacts on productivity is offensive to conventional wisdom. Tasking employees to provide evidence that screen real estate improves their productivity is similarly ludicrous. The phrase "some truths are self evident" comes to mind.

If computers didn't come with a desktop mouse, your logic would seem to suggest employees prove having a desktop mouse improves productivity. Afterall, you can control a PC via the keyboard, so should a company invest their precious pennies on equipping each PC outright with a mouse?

Does an employee really want a mouse? No paid overtime then.

Who wins from that arrangement I wonder? It would probably be the same people who push 16" 1280x1024 monitors for a £100+ right now I imagine, and everyone else loses.

 

[WJA96]

I stand by my statement that companies are getting fleeced for monitors, as per my original example and many others saying the same on this thread. They require next to no maintenance, support, or replacement.

You can sit, stand or lie down by your statement. I was simply explaining the price difference between what it's possible to purchase an item for and what it's possible to purchase an item+service for. Everything costs money. Even the 5 minutes the IT person spends unboxing the monitor and throwing away the packaging costs something in someone's time. A cheap IT person is maybe £25,000 per year once you add in employers NI, holiday cover etc. At 2000-ish working hours per year that's £12.50 per hour or £1 to just unbox the monitor. Let's say that the IT person takes 30 minutes to bring the monitor down to you, connect it up, make sure the drivers are correct etc. maybe even give you a few tips on how to best optimise it. That's now £7.50 that someone has to pay for. And the company supplying the service will want to make a good profit, so call it £10 to install that monitor. You say that monitors don't need maintenance, support or replacement but I would argue with that having spent a short time in frontline support. A user with no screen is completely unproductive, so screens are the one thing you need to have a cold-swap spare for. Who pays for that? You do.

[Edit]I also forgot PAT testing, which will probably be another £2-£5/year depending on how that's operated in your company. All these small costs add up over the life of the device.[/Edit]

If your company decides that's the most economical way to run it's IT department that's for the management to determine and I'm sure they answer to someone for their decisions.

The lack of realisation that screen real estate impacts on productivity is offensive to conventional wisdom. Tasking employees to provide evidence that screen real estate improves their productivity is similarly ludicrous. The phrase "some truths are self evident" comes to mind.

And yet, you couldn't justify your case to the company so they shelled out for a better screen? Apparently it's not so self-evident to the people paying your bills.

 

[Vexr]

I'm sure it's terrifically hard work and very expensive to provide what a normal person could arrange themselves to be delivered to their home for about an 8th of the price of what an in-house IT department quotes for a monitor.

And yet, you couldn't justify your case to the company so they shelled out for a better screen? Apparently it's not so self-evident to the people paying your bills.

I was only on site for about six weeks so didn't press the issue. I'm now happily back working from home and some other poor sod is enjoying their permanent 1280x1024 screen and diminished productivity, but no doubt they'll be reassured the piece of crap adorning their desk has 100% IT support behind it in case of the 1 in a million chance it fails.

 

[WJA96]

I'm sure it's terrifically hard work and very expensive to provide what a normal person could arrange themselves to be delivered to their home for about an 8th of the price of what an in-house IT department quotes for a monitor.

You can be as dismissive as you like but ultimately someone has to do everything and that's what keeps IT personnel employed all day.

I was only on site for about six weeks so didn't press the issue. I'm now happily back working from home and some other poor sod is enjoying their permanent 1280x1024 screen and diminished productivity, but no doubt they'll be reassured the piece of crap adorning their desk has 100% IT support behind it in case of the 1 in a million chance it fails.

Again, you make my point for me. If the 6 weeks could have been reduced to 5 weeks (20% improvement in productivity) then the management would have signed it off immediately. But it wouldn't have been, because the productivity improvements are actually very, very, marginal. And the fact that you've yet to put up anything like a proper metric improvement would suggest you can't stand, lie or sit behind your original assertion.

 

[Vexr]

You can be as dismissive as you like but ultimately someone has to do everything and that's what keeps IT personnel employed all day.

Again, you make my point for me. If the 6 weeks could have been reduced to 5 weeks (20% improvement in productivity) then the management would have signed it off immediately. But it wouldn't have been, because the productivity improvements are actually very, very, marginal. And the fact that you've yet to put up anything like a proper metric improvement would suggest you can't stand, lie or sit behind your original assertion.

You seem to be saying that 4K monitors, 3440x1440 ultrawide monitors, multiple 1080p monitors etc, are the same productivity-wise as a 1280x1024 display, and the burden of proof is on the end-user/employee to demonstrate otherwise. If I'm on site for six weeks only, then the tackling of bureaucracy / 'metrics' I need to provide to demonstrate the difference between monitors is a task well outside my job description, especially with the nature of my work on site where I'm supposed to make an impact immediately, not faffing around with IT.

I mentioned in my original post how many windows I had open, and the sheer mental workload transferring/comparing data on multiples of these at 1280x1024 isn't just a productivity issue, it's a potential accuracy issue as I had to constantly commit information to short term memory and swap between windows, instead of comparing like for like on screen side by side. Some applications, unless they were at 100% maximized, turned into a blurred unreadable mess, so definitely no side-by-side comparisons on any scale at that resolution. If my employer wants to pay me to write a thesis on workstation ergonomics in the context of monitors, I'd have plenty to go on, but I'm employed to do other things.

I can understand tiny monitors with tiny resolutions for bespoke software designed for them, say like in a call centre, where you maybe have one UI designed for 1280x1024 and its been calibrated around that to allow you to navigate between what you need/see what you need to see. For more general purpose office-based work, tiny resolutions are a serious hindrance.

 

[Vexr]

You can be as dismissive as you like but ultimately someone has to do everything and that's what keeps IT personnel employed all day.

TBH I suspect what keeps IT personnel employed all day is answering daft calls from irate employees who claim outlook has failed completely as they can't see a email a colleague has confirmed they sent them recently, and all it actually is is they've got their emails sorted by a tab other than descending by date.

I've watched aghast as otherwise reasonable colleagues who, after my amateur non-official IT input, have decided "Yeah but I'm phoning IT anyway because that's just not RIGHT!" and then gone on to unload bile on some poor IT support guy with a cryptic but charged description of their mundane problem. I can see why IT tech support isn't too popular an occupation, and that much I can sympathise with.

 

[krooton]

TBH I suspect what keeps IT personnel employed all day is answering daft calls from irate employees who claim outlook has failed completely as they can't see a email a colleague has confirmed they sent them recently, and all it actually is is they've got their emails sorted by a tab other than descending by date.

I've watched aghast as otherwise reasonable colleagues who, after my amateur non-official IT input, have decided "Yeah but I'm phoning IT anyway because that's just not RIGHT!" and then gone on to unload bile on some poor IT support guy with a cryptic but charged description of their mundane problem. I can see why IT tech support isn't too popular an occupation, and that much I can sympathise with.

I have access to all our IT Remedy tickets, hardware issue make up a tiny proportion, most tickets are networking, software, or password related.

Not getting better monitors due to some perceived risk of hardware failure and wasiting of IT resource is actually moronic, and I would happily tell a company that and quit.