The Crazy Desk Setup of a Silicon Valley Engineer

Matthew Cheung

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6 min readSep 1, 2019

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Why do you need 5 monitors?! — Basically Everyone

My desk in all its glory. Everything that isn’t my desk was intentionally blurred-out to obscure potentially proprietary information. Photo by Author.

At my office, most people have 2 displays (1 laptop and 1 external monitor).

Some have 3 displays (1 laptop and 2 external).

Very few have 4 displays.

I have 5.

Introduction

I am a product design engineer (mechanical engineer) working in Silicon Valley.

Working with talented industrial designers, electrical engineers, manufacturing & industrial engineers, and program managers, I currently design products for light electric vehicles. (Perhaps check out my day in the life article?)

Day in the Life of a Silicon Valley Engineer

In Silicon Valley, there are quite a few Product Design Engineers. We are mechanical engineers who design consumer…

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My previous adventures include SpaceX, Apple, and Tesla (Elon Musk said “hi” to me one time).

One thing that has remained constant was the craziness of my desk setup. My previous desk setups have been described as “over the top” and “extra”.

I’ll let you be the judge of that.

I get a lot of questions at the office about my desk setup from my coworkers. (If you’re just here for the list of products, it’s at the bottom.)

Quantity

How did you get so many monitors? — A Coworker, Probably

I started off with my standard laptop and 1 external display.

Initially, I was issued a Lenovo ThinkPad P1 laptop¹ (Intel Xeon E-2176M (6-core, 12-threads), 32GB memory, Nvidia Quadro P2000) and one Dell U2719DX¹ (27 inch diagonal, 2560x1440 resolution, IPS panel, “Infinity Edge Bezels”).

I never actually requested any monitors. I just…accumulated them whenever anyone (typically an intern) left the company. I would swoop by their desk and scavenge their monitor (or monitors). They were going to go to the IT cabinet/shelf anyway.

2 monitors are rotated vertically and 2 monitors are on a dual monitor mount stand¹.

The ThinkPad P1 laptop¹ is sitting on top of a space gray laptop stand¹, which itself is sitting on top of a monitor stand¹. The laptop is left open, mostly so that I can use the fingerprint sensor to unlock the computer.

How

How do you drive that many displays? — Likely The Same Coworker

The **Thunderbolt 3 dock**¹ that controls (almost) everything. Connections from left to right: **Thunderbolt 3**¹ to the laptop, A/C Power for the **Dock**¹, **DisplayPort**¹ to Monitor 1 and Monitor 2, USB-A to a hidden USB hub, **USB 3.0 to HDMI**¹ to Monitor 3. Photo by Author.

I use an HP Elite Dock¹ to run 3 of my 4 external monitors.

The best part is that it only utilizes a single Thunderbolt 3 cable¹ to connect to my Thinkpad P1 laptop¹. 2 monitors use DisplayPort cables¹, and 1 monitor uses a USB 3.0 to HDMI adapter (surprisingly this adapter from Plugable¹ works well).

Connections to the laptop. From top to bottom: A/C Power, **Thunderbolt 3**¹ to the **HP Elite Dock**¹, **HDMI**¹ to Monitor 4. Photo by Author.

I could have used another USB 3.0 to HDMI adapter to run the last monitor. However, the rear side of the HP Elite Dock ran out of USB ports. And I didn’t like the aesthetics of running a cable out of the front of the dock. So I used the HDMI port on the laptop to use a HDMI to DisplayPort cable¹ to drive the final monitor.

Why

What do you even put on all 5 monitors? — Literally The Whole Office

Due to the confidentiality of my work place, I don’t have a picture to show with the actual programs or real files open. So I’ll try my best to explain my window setup (from left to right).

Monitor 1: email, calendar, and Slack.

Monitor 2: 8 Windows Explorer windows. (1 is full-time dedicated to screenshots and 1 is for the downloads folder.)

Monitor 3: main monitor (program/task varies depending on what I’m doing). As a mechanical engineer, I typically use 3D modeling CAD software or work with spreadsheets on this monitor.

Monitors 4 and 5 with reference materials open. Photo by Author.

Monitor 4: 2 or 4 Google Chrome windows for reference materials (i.e. Wikipedia articles, Wolfram Alpha calculations, spreadsheets, etc.)

Monitor 5: 2 Google Chrome windows for reference materials.

Yes, I use all 5 monitors. Every single one of them.

ETC

What peripherals do you run? — Some Tech-Savvy Coworkers

The peripherals. Front to back: **3D mouse for CAD**¹, **Apple Magic Keyboard**¹, **Logitech MX Master 2S**¹. All sitting on an **extended mouse pad**¹. **Apple AirPods**¹ underneath the **space gray laptop stand**¹. Photo by Author.

All of my typing happens on an Apple Magic Keyboard¹. I opted to go with the Magic Keyboard with the numeric keypad because I type a lot of numbers as a mechanical engineer.

My mousing happens with the Logitech MX Master 2S¹ wireless Bluetooth mouse. I really enjoy the automatic scroll wheel that switches from click-to-click to hyper-fast scrolling. I also appreciate the dedicated horizontal scroll wheel.

On the left of the keyboard is the 3Dconnexion SpaceMouse Pro¹. It’s a 3D mouse that lets me work with 3D CAD models more efficiently.

Everything sits ontop of a soft extended mouse pad¹. (I like that it appears unbranded and doesn’t have any logos or graphics on the top surface)