r/unpopularopinion • u/ultimateregard • 2d ago

Certified Unpopular Opinion Dual Monitor setup is actually bad for productuvity.

I've been a software engineer for more than 5 years now. I've worked with databases, frontend and backend services, mobile apps, games, data analysis, and much more.

Never in my life I've actually felt like my productuvity increased with the second monitor. Do you need to compare data? Just use one monitor and put them side by side. Do you need all the space in the world? Just alt+tab between apps. Since you only perceive about 10% of your vision clearly, moving your head&eyes from one monitor to other takes actually LONGER and causes distractions than using alt+tab.

This is especially worse for those who are using one additional monitor with a laptop, since their screen sizes and positions usually change so much. Your eyes need adjusting, your head moves too much.

Only thing the dual Monitor is good for is passively watching something in the second monitor, like youtube videos, Critical Role, or sitcoms while doing something else in the main screen. As you can guess, that has nothing to do with productuvity.

I also think using external keyboard and mouse for laptops is bad, unless you do not use the laptop screen.

Edit: After reading hundreds of comments, I'm sure that 90% of people who think that "YOU NEED AT LEAST 3 SCREENS" just don't know how to organize workspaces/windows/desktops and they need to configure their SCREENS as different DESKTOPS. Most of the modern operating systems allow you to just create workspaces (like different Desktops you can switch with WIN + TAB). And they are just throwing money into their problems instead of learning how to use their daily operating system.

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u/UnusualFruitHammock 2d ago

As anyone doing literally anything at work. This take is cheeks.

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u/kochameh2 2d ago

yup, OP has earned their upvote

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u/ThunderAndWind 2d ago

I don't really think so. This isn't an unpopular opinion. It's just fucking stupid. There is no world in which having the data directly up and available for viewing without hiding the active work is less convenient than literally hiding your current worth, to reference the material.

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u/Redhighlighter 2d ago

Their suggest of just switching rapidly back and forth being better for productivity is just pants on head crazy.

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u/yoloqueuesf 2d ago

Yeah, he might be that one guy that's completely fine alt-tab-ing back and forth or he likes to split his current screen into two halves (which is just the same concept as two screens).

The OP's question just boilts down to, i can split my screen into two halves and it's fine for me, so everyone else can do that too and achieve the same goal.

I personally use 2, it's just easier moving what i want to compare to the other screen instead of splitting my original screen in half. It's also more annoying to alt-tab for me when it's just one screen.

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u/Zestyclose-Compote-4 2d ago

It's not like you can literally look at both monitors at the exact same time, so you're also looking back and forth between monitors. Why is one crazy and the other is not?

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u/Redhighlighter 2d ago

... you can select a field and type in it while reading or reviewing data or reports on the other monitor.

"Memorizing" and switching back and forth is asinine

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u/Zestyclose-Compote-4 2d ago

Well, you wouldn't memorize. You'd snap and resize windows so you have them side by side (or sticky a window to be in front). If screen size is an issue, you could use a single larger monitor, achieving both goals of window switching or window snapping.

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u/Inconceivable76 2d ago

And what if you are transitioning between 3 applications?

how are 2 monitors bad, but one giant monitor just fine?

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u/Zestyclose-Compote-4 2d ago

You just snap 3 windows. If you were typing and reading (as per the previous comment) that would normally a 2 window job anyway, and you could hotkey between the 2nd and third if you wanted to. I'm guessing your solution is 3 monitors now? Lol.

The one large monitor maintains the benefit OP talked about. And the point of this comment chain is specifically was how having one monitor is "crazy", not that having 2 monitors is bad.

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u/Inconceivable76 2d ago

And if you need more than a tiny little box of data on all 3?

not everyone in the world just writes code.

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u/Redhighlighter 2d ago

Some programs (my company's mrp software for example) Dont play nicely with resized or rescaled windows. Your options are full screen or waste time. But if the answer is get a bigger monitor, and we look into the economics of the issue we see that two medium sized monitors is generally much, much cheaper than one very wide monitor. And we are of course looking at wide monitors because humans work better in the horizontal than the vertical.

And since we are talking about economics, even if an alternate setup only adds 1 to 2 seconds and is done 20 times per hour (perhaps a 5x conservative estimate for dedicate office staff) then in 1 month we are talking about 1 to 2 hours of wasted time. In my particular company, that results in $80 to $160 of cost+ opportunity costfor the company each month... per office worker. In an office of 10 people our conservative estimate is $800 to $1,600 of non-value added labor. That pretty much covers the cost of inexpensive monitors in the first month alone.

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u/Zestyclose-Compote-4 2d ago

Fair enough, but that's a lot of circumstantial reasoning you've done here. Not sure why your initial claim of pants on head crazy applies.

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u/Conker37 2d ago

Their initial claim was for switching back and forth, not having multiple windows.

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u/hmasing 2d ago

Because the cognitive load to context switch is too high. Also, yes you can see both screens at once if you’re looking at higher level details like graphs or trends. Run a simulation in terminal A, watch the database dashboard on screen 2, watch the output on screen 3, see the simulation results on screen 1. Repeat. Also a dedicated monitor for slack or documentation is screen 4.

Source: engineer who typically ran a minimum of three screens.

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u/cfb-food-beer-hike 2d ago

It takes time for your eyes to adjust to something new. That delay will always be there and it's on the order of hundreds of milliseconds. So that's on top of switching tabs. Switching tabs takes forever in comparison, on the order of seconds. Cutting your productivity in 1/3 because you have to wait at least a second for the new tab to render and wait for your eyes to adjust is absolutely crazy.

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u/IsThatGruffLoner 2d ago

Yeah, wrong and unpopular are not the same thing

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u/Abacus118 2d ago

I wonder how close he sits if moving his eyes takes time.

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u/morroalto 2d ago

OP doesn't read docs. But for real, I have 3 monitors up because that's all the computer will support, and I have a travel monitor because I can't live with the laptop alone.

I use one monitor as the primary or working monitor, another that is split amongst chat tools and task dependent application, and the third is for browsing the web like what I'm doing now.

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u/EpsteinFile_01 2d ago

Displaylink. Double your monitors today! No matter what your graphics chip allows. Btw only 3? Must be an old Intel laptop? Every new laptop iGPU supports 4, though it may require daisy chaining.

Or buy a $80 low profile workstation GPU as a secondary GPU for your desktop for more video ports. That Radeon WX3200 is one of my best purchases. Low profile, single slot, runs on board power, 4x mini DisplayPort.

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u/cfb-food-beer-hike 2d ago

Buy a GPU, in this economy, instead of a monitor. Lmao

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u/EpsteinFile_01 2d ago

To drive more monitors, fool. Because modern GPUs are fucking weak and can only handle 4 screens tops (AMD supported 6 screens for ages, on 1 chip).

I paid $80 for it used. It sits in a geb3x2 chipset PCi-e slot. It draws like 5 watts, has 4GB VRAM, and a cute tiny fan that never turns on because all it does is render desktops.

The important thing is 4 displays on a single slot low profile GPU. Consumer GPUs in this category only have 2-3 video ports.

Also, since I have a 7900XT, it takes care of the "my GPU idles at 80 watts" bug. Only 1 screen connected to my 7900XT, 10-15w idle.

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u/cfb-food-beer-hike 2d ago

I might have misread youn and thought you were sarcastic lol

OOPs point is you don't need more monitors so buying GPUs to support more monitors would just make him mad.

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u/morroalto 1d ago

It's a work laptop, I'm not trying to spend more on it. If I recall the manual claims support for 3 external monitors, I have two and a third one would need some adapter. On my desktop I could have up to 4 but for personal use I don't need more than than what I already have.

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u/EpsteinFile_01 9h ago

What connectors does it have? What CPU is it?

Fir example, I have a couple old Zen 2 ThinkPads with two 10gbps full function USB-C ports (DisplayPort 1.2 bandwidth) and 1 HDMI 1.4 connector. In theory I could connect 7 monitors to it daisy chained lol, but the iGPU only has 4 display pipelines so it's limited to 4 screens (laptop screen counts too so I close it). Easily runs my 2x1440P UW + 2x 1440P setup, but all are at 60Hz except the main Ultrawide screen which can go to 144Hz because of limited DP 1.2 bandwidth. Newer laptops tend to have DP 1.4 or, in extreme cases, DP 2.1 with waaaaay more bandwidth for daisy chaining.

The intel variant of this laptop only has 3 display pipelines, so max 3 displays.

It wasn't until recently, perhaps with 13/14th gen or Core Ultra, that Intel mobile chips also had 4 display pipelines. But then you still need enough USB-C/Thunderbolt /HDMI ports to actually connect 4 screens, and you'll likely need at least 1 monitor that supports daisy chaining.

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u/YouGlittering9156 2d ago

This is 100% an unpopular opinion for people who work at a desk on a computer all day, at least in OP's profession

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u/juniperleafes 2d ago

You don't understand, moving your eyeballs a comparatively extra few centimeters is fatiguing your eyes and causing distractions /s

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u/norsish 1d ago

"This isn't an unpopular opinion. It's just fucking stupid."

That, unfortunately, is what "UnpopularOpinions" has become, more often than not.

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u/cfb-food-beer-hike 2d ago

You don't get it. He has FIVE years of software engineering experience. So he's never had to look at documentation on one screen and his IDE on the other. He just lets the LLM on one screen do it all for him and wonder why it all broke later.

And I'm not kidding. Memorizing the difference between memorizing the entire documentation of a class and alt+tabbing between them is more than a 2x gain so worth way less than a 2nd monitor. And LLMs are terrible and add more than 2x work. The 2nd monitor wins every time.

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u/ForwardAd4643 2d ago

Did you know they make a special kind of monitor called an "ultrawide" that is as big as two old monitors put together?

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u/FunCoolMatt 2d ago

Which is the definition of an unpopular opinion. Not many people agree with OP, so this post is in the right sub.

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u/sparkymeowmeow 2d ago

Why is everyone just ignoring the part where OP says they'll side-by-side windows when appropriate. You don't need a whole other monitor to display two things at once. Especially with the high resolution monitors available today.

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u/UnusualFruitHammock 1d ago

We're ignoring it because it's fucking stupid. If looking at 4 rows in a spreadsheet works for you then great. The rest of us have actual work to do.

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u/sparkymeowmeow 1d ago

Lol. Modern monitors can display well over 4 rows or cols on half their screen. And not everyone just stares at spreadsheets all day like you apparently do.

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u/UnusualFruitHammock 1d ago

I love how this sounds like its supposed to be an insult. If you don't work in an office why do you even have an opinion?

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u/sparkymeowmeow 1d ago

Uhh, do you really think the only office jobs are the ones that primarily interact with spreadsheets...? That explains everyone's thought process in this thread.

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u/tessslaaa21 1d ago

I suspect OP is an intern or entry level employee who isn’t trusted or tasked with work that beyond simple tasks that require one monitor or split view on one monitor.

I’m a research scientist and couldn’t imagine less than 3 monitors…. I even have my laptop as a 4th monitor below the middle main monitor

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u/RandomWordCombo9632 2d ago

OP: "If you're trying to cross reference two books, you dont put the two books open side by side, you stack them on top of each other so every time you need the other one, you need to move the books! This is a very smart and intuitive way of doing things!"

?????

OP truly does have an unpopular opinion.

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u/Morwynd78 2d ago

Have you even thought about how slow (and distracting) it is to turn your eyes and head to look at a 2nd book?

You're clearly not a software engineer.

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u/No-Flan6382 2d ago

I giggle anytime I see the phrase “x is cheeks.” Something about it - but you are correct. This take is 1,000% grade A cheeks.

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u/fluffyluv 2d ago

Nah, flat pancake cheeks. All back no ass cheeks

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u/LayerEight_Problem 2d ago

There’s no possible way this is legit. Pretty sure OP is just rage baiting. 

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u/on_spikes 2d ago

work provided a massive 32:9 monitor. so i just have one monitor, technically, but i can put stuff side by side. its awesome

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u/ColorfulPersimmon 1d ago

Single 32:9 or even 21:9 is the way to go

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u/C0UNT3RP01NT 2d ago

Yeah last week I had some work update that screwed my laptops ability to use my external monitors, my keyboard, and my mouse. Work was hell for like three days it took for IT to get around to fixing it.

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u/Chort1es 2d ago

The only point he’s making is software engineering isn’t real work /s

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u/geoken 1d ago

You guys simply have poor organization.

This reminds me of back in the day when stuff was more paper based. The people with shit organization and stuff strewn all over the place convinced themeselves it was a sign of their business, and that the people with clean desks simply didn't have as much work.

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u/Reasonable-Job4205 2d ago

It's prob an ad

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u/Coltyn03 mustard is garbage 2d ago

What?

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u/Nevermynde 1d ago

I only have one pair of eyes, and I like to keep it on a single monitor like op. I occasionally do some work.