I've happily brought equipment purchased at my own expense to work. It amortizes down to very little over the lifetime of the hardware (even a $1600 workstation laptop amounts to roughly $0.25 per hour over 3 years at 40 hours a week) and makes work so much more efficient (always a plus at performance review time) and just plain more pleasant.
> I've happily brought equipment purchased at my own expense to work.
How do you make sure that everyone understand that that equipment belongs to you and not The Company? I'm currently resorting to printed labels of my name or initials, but I can't help but consider that that's a tissue defence.
> How do you make sure that everyone understand that that equipment belongs to you and not The Company?
For BYOD laptops/PCs, keep the receipt (which will usually include the serial number) and store a photocopy at the office in a place where you can easily keep track of it. If it's something shipped direct from the manufacturer, keep the box with the shipping label on it as additional evidence. You can also let your manager know that you have equipment that you personally own on-premises and give him an itemized list with serial numbers. For small items like mice, keyboards, etc., they're generally not worth enough to lose sleep over if lost.
Beyond that, the general rule of never bringing anything to work you're not willing to lose applies. Just like any other kind of BYOD device, your employer is not going to reimburse you if your personal hardware is stolen or accidentally damaged, so take appropriate precautions.
Lastly, make sure that you secure _and_ backup data on your hardware at least as well as your IT team does for company issued hardware. Your manager is not going to be at all sympathetic if you lose work due to a hardware failure on your BYOD device or due to malware.
In the companies I've worked in, they did not permit personal computers in the office (they were okay with mice/monitors etc.) The logic was that it posed too great a security risk. In one instance for a high profile project I wasn't allowed to even enter the office area with my phone (to prevent people from taking screenshots)
I've always brought my own headphones or mechanical keyboards and they're pretty obviously not-company. I've never purchased any actual machines though. If I need equipment, I get the shop or contracting/staffing company to buy it. No reason to spend money on that stuff. We're not auto mechanics.
I've been using my own mechanical keyboards forever. You make a lot of friends with a model M in an open office (suffice it to say, use quieter switches now).
The U3415W is the monitor I finally got at work. It's a nice monitor.
At home I have a Benq bl3201pt, which is a 4k 16:9 monitor. It's nice as well, but does have a flickering issue (one side of the screen will flash every 4-8 hours or even 1-2 days).
I use an X34 at home, aside from quality issues (needed a warantee repair after 6 weeks, nontrivial shipping and hassle), it's a fantastic monitor for every task.
I've never understood the tendency towards multiple monitors over one larger monitor.
I find multiple monitors easier to manage with a tiling window manager and offer a better "separation of concerns" in terms of grouping of active applications I want to see. But my home set up includes 3 28in displays so I may just have a problem, ymmv.
1440 vertical pixels in a 34" 21:9 monitor means you usually don't have to worry about whether your software can adapt to a non-standard DPI. At about 109 DPI, it's the same as a typical 27" 16:9 panel, just with more pixels off to the side. The density is a bit higher than the typical ~94 DPI of a 24" 16:10 display, but the difference can be tolerated by most users. Jumping up to 140 DPI (32" 4k 16:9) is enough that you either need exceptionally good vision, or you need to compensate through software scaling adjustments or major ergonomic changes.
27" iMac has been 2560×1440 from 2009 until they went retina in 2014 (and they're now double in both dimensions, so same logical resolution).
At arm's length, on a 27" screen, 1440p is very practical. Getting more screen space than 1080p is what bumped me from 21-24" screens, and it fills my vision enough that if I jumped to 4k I'd either be moving my head back and forth with a 40" screen, dealing with even smaller UI elements, or wrestling with OS scaling.
For development I take screen real estate over PPI. The idea is to run it at native resolution while being very readable, and to be able to work on multiple documents side by side.
(And for coding you actually need height more than width, if you think of a typical layout of a code file)
I agree with you. I'd love to try a 4k screen, and was even considering it - however in the end I took my home U3415W to work and bought the X34 for home (I might game 30 minutes a week or something; the extra hz are certainly nice for that, otherwise they are pretty much identical).
I value actual real estate over PPI, preferring to run at 100% / unscaled which looks much nicer in Win10. The 109PPI (3440x1440) is decent enough, and I don't have to squint. Furthermore the DPI matches those of the surrounding 16:10 24s (1920x1200) well enough for it not to be an issue.
I am trying not to cargo cult here but I think if I need to scroll a file with 9 font on a 32"+ screen with 4k display it might be a sign of code smell (again, this should definitely not be a hard rule just saying it might be nice to stop and think why it is so long)?
I would be happy to pay out of my own pocket for a better hardware than the POS I am forced to work with. All the machines are connected with 100Mbit, and we only just switched from Windows XP...
Well, it's a large company with lots of in-house software, so that's the official reason for the delayed roll out of Windows 7. But I think it has more to do with bureaucracy and inefficiency.
For not bringing my own hardware, security (it's a bank).
