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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 ....