[fleddr]

It's accounting bias/culture.

Say you have a 100 developers and you reason each should get a second monitor worth 300$, because this increases productivity by 20%.

According to an accountant, you just added 30K in costs to the books, with nothing to show for it. You can't eat productivity nor is it a line item in the books.

Who is to say that this 20% of freed up time is used productively? Or used on things that increase revenue? If so, how much revenue? And when?

[midoridensha]

>Say you have a 100 developers and you reason each should get a second monitor worth 300$, because this increases productivity by 20%.

>According to an accountant, you just added 30K in costs to the books, with nothing to show for it. You can't eat productivity nor is it a line item in the books.

Right, this is why developers should NOT get 2nd monitors.

Even better, the business can save another $30k by not getting the developers any monitors at all.

[jlokier]

You joke, but my current job sent me a Dell laptop with a tiny screen and a fancy 4-video port USB-C dock. Seem I'm expected to have my own monitors.

(Turns out I do have my own monitors, but they are for my own laptop, and are HDMI and Thunderbolt which the dock isn't, except one HDMI.)

[Eisenstein]

If you can't quantify it, it doesn't exist, and when you start to quantify it, the numbers turn into targets that must continually improve.

[fleddr]

Yep, and I think we can apply the accounting logic to the original article.

A team that regularly saves costs for other business units is a promise of cost savings. Dropping the entire time is an immediate and factual cost saving.

Short-sighted? Yes.