First of all, the really smart programmers can see through it and they sooner or later quit. Second of all, in order to do quality programming you have to have a clear mind. And once you start hallucinating after staring at the monitor for twelve hours, the quality of your work goes down the drain. You d think that software companies would try to provide their programmers with the best tools money can buy, if they cared so much about increasing their productivity. Well, you d be surprised to find out that many programmers have more powerful computers at home than they do at work.
Programmers love large high resolution screens.
But big monitors are expensive, so they are mostly for the managers. Surely there must be a lot of software tools that make programmers more productive. You d think a big software company must spend lots of money not only buying the best tools, but also developing new ones for internal consumption. Why do you think they should spend money on tools if they can simply hire more programmers. This vicious circle will continue until the situation becomes so bad that a paradigm shift will have to occur.