So, I'm starting to feel like my work situation is getting a little "out-of-control":
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Basically where I'm currently sitting at work I have 8 screens surrounding me. 3 laptops with an extra 23" monitor attached and a desktop PC with two 23" monitors attached.

I also have a cubicle outside of this room that has a dock for one of my laptops with 2x 24" monitors attached to it.

The operating systems on the 3 laptops are:
Windows 10, Fedora 27, Windows 7

On the Desktop PC it's Fedora 27 as well.

Basically I'm porting (rewriting) a point-of-sale application that was initially written in C++ (with MFC, DirectDraw, and DirectSound) for Windows XP Embedded to GNU/Linux (Fedora 27) .. I'm still using C++ but without all the Microsoft Foundation Classes junk, I'm also using SDL2 + OpenGL 4.5 for graphics and so far SDL2 for sound). The original had two displays ... One which was a touchscreen and faced the retailer and the second would face the customer and play animations, videos, sounds etc.

Being surrounded by this many monitors though ... It's getting pretty warm. (And it's not even summer yet!)

This all got me curious ... What's the typical a.cc'er using at work these days?

Nice. I had the option of getting a 32" 4K monitor for my cubicle but I instead opted to have 2x 24" monitors there. I suppose if I really wanted to know I could move those monitors in here as well and then I'd have 10 displays across 4 computers. Man, that would be sweet.

I do as a matter of fact! Although not as much as one might thing since our corporate phone directory lists my extension for my cubicle (which I'm rarely at any more). Nine times out of 10 when this phone rings it's actually for the developer who sat here previously (but our corporate phone directory is out of date).

I actually do use the phone to make calls as well. I exclusively use the 'hands-free' button so I can keep typing while on the call. I typically only use the phone to dial in to conference calls for meetings. As soon as I let the meeting chair-person know that I'm in the meeting I'll mute myself.

I've been told that in the near future we'll be ditching land-lines and going exclusively to soft-phones. Probably through Skype or something.

Edit:
I really hope that computer monitors haven't been linked to cancer ... because I just got another 23" monitor for my Windows 7 laptop. So now I'm surrounded by 6 computer monitors and 3 laptop displays.

di
Unfortunately IT jobs in this city seem to fall into three categories:

• Dated technology with really good salaries

• Newer technology with really crappy salaries

• Government Grant (aka Taxpayer subsidized) companies with super crappy salaries

The company I'm at definitely falls into the former, although we've been making strides to update our technology. There are a bunch of factors that got us this far behind the curve. One of which is because the majority of our development staff are over the age of 50 and are resisting change. Now that they are starting to drop off thanks to retirements and we are starting to get some young blood and fresh ideas here things are starting to look up.

So yeah, I'll stick to my pretty good salary and awesome pension and benefits package I'm getting

My home station is nice. 4K/55" on my desk.

My "work" laptop is a piece of !@$! refurb HP with a broken hinge, replaced display cable, broken keyboard now, broken usb port, and a 5400 RPM HDD that's slow as mud with an AMD APU CPU. My boss is a cheap !@$!.

It's literally faster to RDP into my home machine hosting a Win10 VM, then work from the laptop itself.

The first part about not having your my own office is fairly typical for this city. Most IT companies have their programmers sharing one large room (with cubicles). Individual offices are reserved for management. But I do agree with you torhu, individual offices would definitely decrease distractions and increase productivity.

About Windows 7 ... We are in the process of migrating to Windows 10. Our company employs more than 17,000 people across the entire province of Ontario ... so we've got lots of machines to replace and update. Plus, across the entire company there are thousands of applications in use that need to be tested on Windows 10. So it's a slow moving endeavor. But we are working on it.

I liken this company to a big ship (like the Titanic). We've been given the directive to modernize our technology ... but it takes considerable time and effort to do so. But we have started to turn and momentum is starting to build.

As soon as I'm done with this point-of-sale software port I'll probably be tasked with porting a bunch of PowerBuilder applications to something more modern (either C# WinForms or some form of WebApps).

I have two HP Folio 9480M laptops, each with a Core i5-4310U, 160GB solid state drive and 8.00GB of RAM (those are my Windows machines). I have a Folio 9470M with a core i5-3437U, 8 gigs of RAM and a 250 gig SSD. My desktop PC is an HP EliteDesk with a core 15-4690, 8 Gigs of RAM, and a 500GB hdd.

They also just bought me a brand new Samsung Galaxy S8+ for my 'on-call' phone (which replaced my BlackBerry Passport they bought brand new for me last year).

Well, the S8+ is considered a 'phablet' I think. So there's that

It was a 'major award'

Actually it was just a Christmas Gift from my dad. Most people have no idea where it's from though.

It's actually quite functional:
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My work laptop has an i7-5700HQ @ 2.7 GHz, nVidia GTX970M, 16 GB RAM (according to Windows; I thought it was 12 GB), 128 GB SSD, and a 500 GB HDD @ 5400 RPM. The sticker says it supports 4K output, but the laptop screen itself only handles 1920x1080. In the actual office I have two old, crappy monitors, averaging 20" each which I think are also limited to 1920x1080. I'm almost never in my office though.

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I mostly work from home these days. It's a godsend. Nothing fancy, but all the luxuries of home are behind me.

How do you know what it feels like?

I decided to throw that there after the millionth fucking time the cat tried to climb on my laptop or scratch his head on the screen and bend it too far forward for comfort. I hoped that he just wanted to be near me (since there's no other good reason to ALWAYS come to the desk ONLY when I'm using it) so I figured I'd designate a corner (by throwing away a printer) so he knew he had space and it was out of my way.

It worked for a few days, but it wasn't long before he was pestering me again. He uses the bed maybe 3 times a month. Otherwise, he'll poke the bear repeated until the bear throws him in the bedroom (or lately, his carrier). He's Lucky^[1] it isn't over the balcony I say.

This is my first cat, but he's intolerable half of the day. How do you know my cat is in trouble? He's not laying the fuck down.

I tell people that is a key about dogs.

A good dog is a tired dog.

You want to train a dog? Make sure to play with it first and it'll be less resistant to training. (But not too much and it'll be exhausted). Also, if you don't find a POSITIVE (running) outlet for your dog's energy, the dog will find a NEGATIVE (tearing up carpet) one.

That's one skookum laptop. My laptops are 'meh'. They don't feel like they are slowing me down or acting like bottlenecks and I don't think having any faster would increase my productivity much. Apparently the new laptops we are getting are supposed to be really high performance. We'll see.

I theoretically could work from home, but at home I don't have any extra monitors, (not any good any ones at least), and then there's the fact that my wife would have Netflix or Youtube on the TV and I'd be constantly distracted.

Edit:
Ah yes. Our dog would also provide no end of distraction. (And I'm a sucker and humor the dog every time). On the plus side I'd probably get much more exercise taking the dog for countless walks. Here's a picture of the doggo (her name is Sasha) waiting for me get home from work (no doubt so I could take her for a walk and play with her):
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That poor doggy!

I use an extension called something like "Power Tools" for Visual Studio (I think published by Microsoft). This yields a vertical tab bar that can be scrolled I think which is much better than the hidden tab list, at least for me. Of course, that would steal a bit of extra horizontal space from you for the bar, but I typically hide my side panes until I hover over them to save space so you could potentially use that to get some space back.

On a side note, I've recently discovered that my mouse hand sweats like crazy when I'm gaming and sometimes when working. I'm not sure if it's stress-related or what, but I've actually invested in some special "lotion" that is supposed to help prevent that. My mouse is pretty gross already, but it's really gross when my hand is dripping wet using the mouse. I'm hoping this will help. I won't bother naming the brand until I've tried it though.. But Google should yield similar results if any of you also suffer from this. Of course, if it is stress-related the ideal cure is to relieve the stress if you can. I digress.

We have a mutual friend who experienced this problem (not sure if he still does). His sweat literally 'ate' through his mouse. First the plastic got all discolored (looked like it was actually 'corroding') and then it got really thin and started 'caving in' ... like it corroded so thin that there were holes in it. And this happened over the course of a year or two.

It was bizarre to look at.