I work for a global 500 company, specialized in producing large technical equipment for aerospace. Our core activity is engineering and industrial production. For the area it's not a shitty company, the conditions are good and they have no trouble attracting employees.

In the engineering department those who don't do 3d CAD get a single 20" screen, and a laptop with 8Gb RAM. Those who use CAD get a single 24" screen and bigger laptop with a 3d card. Everyone gets the $5 keyboard and mouse that comes with the corporate HP laptops. Basically all offices (except for managers) are the noisy open-office type.

I've been to quite a few suppliers, all industrial/engineering companies of different sizes, and it's a pretty standard setup. It's not some shitty companies, it's just that all companies (at least not specialized in software) just take the basic material that they rent from their corporate suppliers. You can't show a positive ROI/business case for buying a $50 Logitech mouse to 50k office employees, so they all get the free included HP mouse. Same for the rest.

I'm not even getting into the locked-down version of Windows that everyone gets to use. Even launching portable executables is technically against the rules, not that it stops anyone. Until a few years ago most websites were blocked, so it's getting better at least.

In general I think it's pretty ok, it's not really a big issue. That's how the industry is. But very few companies give a very good environment and good computer devices to their knowledge workers. You just need to adapt. Bringing your own devices help. You can choose not to, many do, and accept to spend 8 hours/day using what they give you.

I worked at a aerospace defense contractor 8 years ago and this tracks with my experience. The quality of the equipment is terrible as is the pay in comparison to jobs with similar qualifications. I understand the economics of why these jobs suck, but there's no reason to stay.

8 years ago I had to move from an area I liked to get a better job. It will be interesting to see what happens with the rise of more remote hiring.

I've been working most of the last 6 years at a rather small space company. After discussing work conditions with enough people who worked at other space companies, I'm pretty damn sure I'd never work in the space industry again after I leave here, lol.

I've heard stories about "water clubs" and "coffee clubs" because some companies are so cheap they don't even pay for bottled water machines - so the employees group together and pay for it themselves. Like WTF?! And a couple of these stories came from programmers too.

As far as I know, we get paid better, have free basics like that (there was free lunch before covid), and whenever we carry our equipment to test sites, it's usually several generations newer and better than anything else I see at those sites. It's kinda funny lol.

It's a bit of a golden handcuffs thing I suppose. The problem is even if they pay better than anyone else in the space industry, I could probably double my compensation by getting a job at google. Of course, landing an interview at google in itself seems nearly impossible.

Sometimes I wonder if having a space company on your resume is a bad mark for hiring managers at companies like google. It kinda feels that way. Like as if only the riff raff work at space companies. But there are a lot of us who just wanted to work on cool stuff lol.

The issue is that in my experience the entire aerospace/aeronautics sector is like that. As well as most industrial sectors. At least if I stay in Europe.

So changing that means doing something else than my studies and experience. And I like working on aircraft.

I don't really have complains about salaries though. I find it's pretty normal compared to other industries. It's pale in comparison to the US, but that's a matter of continent, not sector.

Oh nice. I've worked in aerospace too, on smaller parts and sensors (didn't require a large office/factory).

The office was somewhat compartmentalized with biometrics between some rooms, classic in aerospace/defense work. IMO we were at zero risk of having an open office plan or noisy neighbors because of the domain.

The higher manager believed in giving double displays to those who did EE (layout and routing). Eventually every engineers was officially doing that to qualify for the double displays.

We were buying a fair amount of parts/electronics/hardware as part of the activity, some of it rather expensive. It wasn't too difficult to slip displays into the larger orders and get them approved. I recall every test bench I made came de facto with a PC and dual IPS display in the bill of materials lol

Maybe things have gotten better but I worked at a couple of large engineering companies in London 5-10 years ago and cramped, shitty, open plan offices with cheap ancient hardware was very much the norm at every place I worked at and visited. Coming from offices in Norway and Sweden I was shocked at how terrible their working conditions where.

Incidentally I've worked in London for the past few years, in a bank. Every desk in the building is equipped with aeron chair and multiple monitors. Yes every single one in the whole skyscraper (10 000 employees).

That includes multiple floors full of developers. On our floor the entire department had quadruple monitors (24" IPS Dell UltraSharp monitors if you're interested). Allegedly we're privileged because the norm is only 3 monitors for developers, the story goes that when the department was opened almost 20 years ago the head decided that developers would get proper equipment or the department wouldn't be opened.

Back to Dell, many companies are simply procuring equipment from Dell. The most classic display they sell is the Dell UltraSharp 24" IPS display, which is really good and really affordable.

London is the biggest tech hub in Europe with the most tech companies, quite of few of which are very serious about equipment because tech culture. I've not seen a company that didn't have dual displays since I moved here. I can't imagine a company that can't buy a display if you tell them what do buy. I don't want to jump into "just leave your company" because it's a bad HN trope, especially in COVID times, but come on, if your company can't procure a display/chair you can find a better company.

Not every sector/location allows to find a "better company". We're not all superstar JS developers in a tech hub.

I believe a small increase in productivity per employee for a bank is worth a lot more than in most other industries. In my experience the quality of the equipment scales with the per employee profitability.

I've never worked for a place that prevented me from bringing my own chair, ottoman, keyboard and mouse. Usually I was the only person on the floor to do so, though.

Worked in London and your experience doesn’t reflect mine.

I had a somewhat different experience working in London (multiple clients) for the last 7 years. I guess it depends on the employer, but generally hardware / furniture is not that expensive compared to salaries and rent of the building in London, so things are decent quality.

Open office are an unfortunate reality, space is expensive.

Almost every bank I've seen in 3 European county has something like this. Java middleware companies, same story. And these are big companies and they're not a few companies.

> countryside Europe [...] personal offices or small offices for 1-3 people

But of course there's more space in the countryside!

I worked for a top-20 Fortune company (granted not software but we were still glued to our laptops the whole day) and the environment and equipment were exactly like OP described.