In a former life about ten years ago I transitioned to managing a long-established, mature …

I think that providing modern monitors that make sense is probably the easiest way to please employees. No matter how excellent the salary is, if they are stuck working on old, small, blurry, faded screens, they'll be unhappy. It also gives a bad impression of the company as a whole. I did L1 tech support a long time ago, and people were overwhelmingly happy to see me coming to replace their old CRTs with LCDs.

Every time I’ve worked at a company where teams started picking their own hardware and expensing it, it ended like this. It usually started with reasonable orders, but once some teams notice that expensing hardware is working they try to push the limits of what they can get away with. Ended up with weird situations like software and accounting people rocking those ultra expensive Apple cinema displays while sitting in their new Aeron chairs at their motorized standing desks which were always in the sitting down position. Then someone gets shocked by the office expense line item at quarterly review time and cuts it off for everyone to try to balance out those expenditures for the rest of the year. So we’d have a few people in the office with tricked out workstations and high end gear and then everyone else was on the same generic monitor and chair that was decided for the whole company lo…