If anyone's got to be suffering from WFH, it must be traders. People used to having an office with Las-Vegas-level power requirements, who can't get an electrician to install a sub-panel in their home-office penthouse and now have to suffer with just a laptop and a flatscreen requisitioned from a teenager's Xbox. Because these folks are used to multimonitor set-ups.
Let's look at the different levels:
What, only two monitors, you amateur? But look closely and you'll see they have multiple windows open in each. So it's like (stoner voice) virtual monitors, mannn.
Perhaps a better choice than 1x2 if your vision isn't great, as you don't have to shrink windows to fit into less space.
Double the 1x4 screenage, but you can no longer yell at a coworker over the top of your monitor bank.
The trade-off to going Large screen is that they have to be placed flush to the desk surface, so you lose some desktop real estate and can't shove things under the monitors.
This rebel's got a seventh monitor at top left. Not sure why he didn't go full 2x4; maybe the blank space gives him good sightlines to the bathroom or the room entrance.
Plenty of under-monitor shovage space, which you'll need as the wrap of the monitor bank is eating heavily into the desktop real estate.
Pro level. A subset of human beings cannot withstand this level of radiation, for that many hours a day. Plus it's gotta be ten degrees hotter sitting in front of that rig. Everyone is forced to wear light colors just to reflect the heat.
I’m a lapsed industrial designer. I was born in NYC and figured I’d die there, but a few years ago I abandoned New York to live on a farm in the countryside with my wife. We have six dogs.
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Photos of People Who Are Used to Working With a Lot of Monitors
I worked in financial services on a trading desk for many years. The basic idea behind the multiple screens is to be able to keep the "gestalt" of the market in continuous view and to monitor conditions better than your competitors. Only about 1-2 screens are for actually "doing work" such as entering orders or updating risk models. The rest are all display-only.
The mental energy required for a "context switch" to change back and forth between applications is actually quite significant -- some studies suggest a 20% to 30% loss of productivity, which can be deadly in a time-sensitive environment. It's bad enough if you're an architect, but it's way worse when you're a trader.
1) market data -- alerts would highlight the data we needed to see such as price changes outside a given range, etc.
2) communications -- e-mail to customers and instant messaging to the trading desk. Apps would flash and stay red when communications came in. I could see that out of my peripheral vision, and it would cut the time between receiving a response and replying to seconds versus tens of minutes or hours.
Man these folks love their workplace!........ Very few people in these photos seem to be having a nice time ....