Developers ranked by monitor setup in the D&D alignment chart
Description
The image is a nine-panel Dungeons & Dragons alignment chart captioned (left-to-right, top-to-bottom) “lawful good”, “neutral good”, “chaotic good”, “lawful neutral”, “true neutral”, “chaotic neutral”, “lawful evil”, “neutral evil”, and “chaotic evil”. Each panel shows a stylized Windows-blue desktop on different arrangements: three identical landscape monitors (lawful good), two landscape monitors (neutral good), one large with a smaller offset landscape monitor (chaotic good); one desktop monitor plus a laptop screen (lawful neutral), a single monitor (true neutral), one landscape next to a portrait-rotated monitor (chaotic neutral); two portrait monitors stacked vertically (lawful evil), two portrait monitors side-by-side (neutral evil), and a chaotic cluster of six mismatched screens in mixed orientations (chaotic evil). The drawings sit on a light gray background with dashed borders, and a small “t.me/dev_meme” watermark appears at the bottom left. By mapping tidy versus eccentric multi-monitor workstations onto the classic alignment grid, the meme pokes fun at developer ergonomics debates and productivity folklore
Comments
13Comment deleted
Conway’s Law on your desk: the monolith team ships from three identical landscape screens, but the microservices crew ends up with the six-screen portrait-landscape hydra - when you split an app into 47 services, you need one monitor per dashboard just to know which one’s paging
The real alignment chart is how many monitors you need before admitting that the problem isn't screen real estate - it's that legacy codebase with 47 layers of abstraction and a build system held together by bash scripts written by someone who left in 2014
The 'true neutral' single monitor developer is either a minimalist zen master who's transcended the need for screen real estate, or they're still waiting for their hardware budget approval from three quarters ago. Meanwhile, the 'chaotic evil' six-monitor setup is what happens when you tell a senior engineer 'just expense whatever you need' without setting a dollar limit - they've essentially built a mission control center to debug a React component
The true alignment test is mixed‑DPI portrait/landscape at 125% - chaotic evil is when Windows teleports your cursor while Teams asks to share “Screen 4” that doesn’t exist
Chaotic evil isn’t six screens - it’s a 4K portrait beside a 1080p landscape: per‑monitor DPI is the distributed transaction your window manager will never commit
Lawful Good: monitors aligned like your IaC templates. Chaotic Evil: stacked higher than prod incidents on New Year's Eve
Chaotic neutral is for those who use VS Code Comment deleted
I am chaotic good / lawful neutral / true neutral by this test Comment deleted
I am true neutral and lawful evil, depends on the location I am working from Comment deleted
I am lawful neutral as I use laptop with secondary screen but in lawful evil setup :p Comment deleted
I'm true neutral. Comment deleted
I'm gay Comment deleted
Windows - evil Comment deleted