… well put, not to mention how all other aspects of ergonomica become double important for programmers, i think out of all my office place, the tech team is the one that spends the most sitting behind computer screens anyway.
I personally expect a good couple of decades of this behaviour so I caught on to ergonomics early and it’s been quite a refresher.
My biggest fear however isn’t my back or bum (for that there’s quite a bit of technology, ergo this article), rather my hands, more specifically my mouse finger. I have a padded wrist mousepad, and every now and then rest specific left-hand fingers as I type naturally, but always am forced to use ONE finger on my right hand for clicking, i hope i don’t develop anything in future off of 20 years worth of heavy programmer-job clicking, there’s been enough talk about tunnel syndrome out there anyways.
Scottish and Canadian researchers used a new form of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to show it places an unnecessary strain on your back. They told the Radiological Society of North America that the best position in which to sit at your desk is leaning back, at about 135 degrees.
Also, a good picture of the popular Swopper in action, here:
I don’t know about the rest of the chairs above, but the Aeron failed me and I spent the last 8 years sitting on a much more traditional chair instead. The problem is that the absolute top end of the Aeron’s adjustment range is about an inch too short for me. The only thing I’ve found that fits right is a drafting chair (without the footrest) at the BOTTOM of its range. Being 6’5 is frequent a pain.
Hear, hear! Very interesting post — really like the broad range of programming-related topics on Coding Horror, btw. As for myself, I have the pleasure of sitting on a Hg chair (http://www.hag.no). Sublime chairs, though indeed rather expensive. Worth every cent, though
I have had Aerons in the past, but now have TWO Miras - one in the office-office and one in the home-office, as bringing it home on the train every day was annoying the other commuters
I agree that the Mira is better for reclining, which I reckon programmers SHOULD be doing quite a bit of, as we should be thinking a lot, rather than just typing-typing-typing!!
Love this topic. Find it very hard to pick a perfect chair. One thing I do wish to add is how the mesh type is so much more forgiving on your clothes than the solid ones. Before I had mesh chairs my shirts really didn’t last long because of the tear on the lower back. That’s why I’d never go back to non-mesh.
I feel Bill has a point in what he’s writing, you seem to have entered a reminiscence mode/zone and you have been posting topics in a re-visiting kind of way.
but its true too that I am kind of new to this blog (maybe a year or so), still I’m taking my time to read all of your old posts which I find are pretty good, insightful and interesting, I have seen how your way of conveying your thoughts have been evolving, how they are becoming more polished and more refined over time, and that is precisely the reason I feel bill has a point.
BUT as you point out, every revisited topic has enough new info as to make it worthwhile write about them again, and as you have said in the past this blog is about making us think more on what would make all of us better programmers.
anyways, this post actually made me think on my current chair, is so cheap and old it doesnt even have wheels or where to put my arms -__-
i will have to go and see where i can buy the Herman Miller Mirra chair that can deliver to where i live (see, it really was worth to write about this topic again it made me think again how bad my chair is!)
I’ve never spent $500 on a chair and I’m not sure I would. I love my $88 computer chair from Sams. And at that price, I can actually replace it every 2 years and still come out cheaper than your 10-year chair.
The chair I have now is nice, but the arms are a little torn because sometimes they get caught under the keyboard tray when I slide the chair too close to the desk.
How tear/scratch resistant are some of these chairs? At $700+, I’d like it if the chair didn’t look like a war zone after a year or two.
Spending $500+ on a chair seems pretty ridiculous to me. I understand you’re sitting in it for a prolonged period of time, but I would much rather spend the money on a monitor, or desk, or keyboard, etc. Items that I feel are much more important to a programmer.
I think if you look around hard enough you can find a pretty decent chair for around $150. I got mine for $140 about five or six years ago and it’s still going strong. I don’t see any reason to drop another couple hundred dollars to get something that’s pretty much the same.
I am currently sitting on a 40$ (in fact €) chair, and it is killing me. I am 19 years old. But my back, my lower back that is, is feeling like I am 80 or something, my arms and hands are tingling and my upper legs doesn’t feel good either.
But my problem is that i really cannot afford a seat that costs over 500$. So I think i will sit on this damned chair for the next year, and then I have to buy another cheap chair, cause this one is braking down.
By the way, I am not working as a programmer, but I am sitting here, working at my PC for almost 10 to sometimes 12 hours a day at home, and at school, its the same thing, sitting on a chair which i wouldn’t even let my dog pee at. But their is not much i can do about it…
I’ve got the Ergohuman Mesh at work, and it’s really nice. Not sure if it’s as nice as the Mirra or Leap, but it does a great job for me. Even better since I got my company to buy it for me.
Since I’m going to start working from home due to gas prices, I wonder if I can convince them to buy me a new chair for my home office, as well.
We don’t need multi-chair review – reviews of chairs are useless for anything but picking initial batch of candidates. Trying the chairs at retailer’s place is not very useful either, except for discarding bad ones. You really do have to loan the chair and try it for at least 3-4 days, as another person here said.
I did that a year ago, trying 3 chairs: Aeron (none of the other H-M chairs, Mira included, suited me), Freedom and Leap. Herman-Miller and Humanscale offered me to try the chairs with no problems. Steelcase dealer here was a pain in the ass (apparently, they couldn’t care less about people buying only 1-2 chairs), I had to pull the call-the-headquarters trick on them, but man, did they try to please me after somebody from Steelcase US gave them a call…
In the end, I picked Leap with the mesh back (it doesn’t cool as well as Aeron’s mesh, but it’s better than solid back of other Leap variants or Freedom). I didn’t like doing it, the dealer was really bad, while both H-M and Humanscale were simply great. But they’re the only Steelcase dealer here and the other two chairs didn’t work for me:
Aeron doesn’t have enough lower back support, even with the lumbar support add-on and wasn’t very comfortable in reclined position and the front edge is hard.
Freedom is a cool mechanism. It moves with you and stabilizes itself in the position you pick, staying rigid enough to support you, but it’s still easy to push against it and recline further. But the material the seat is made from is a little bit slippery (and they don’t offer alternatives). I found myself sliding towards front edge of the seat over time. That simply won’t do if you’re prone to tail bone pain. Arm rests are not very configurable (IIRC they don’t adjust in all three directions, but I may remember this one incorrectly).
Leap, on the other hand, has great, rigid lumbar support (in its fully equipped version). It’s wonderful, really: no matter how I sit in the chair, I can feel solid support of the back. I rarely have tail bone or lower back pain anymore – when I do, it’s because I sat on something else somewhere, in which case Leap’s lubar support is great for relieving any leftover pain that would otherwise reinforce itself by sitting again. Arm rests have by far widest range of positions of the three chairs. It lacks headrest, which is pity (the one version that has it is made from leather – can you imagine sitting in that for 8+ hours?). On the other hand, I use headrest only briefly, when fully reclined and thinking about something – putting hands behind my neck works just as well for that.
I’m in the market for a new chair for my house, since my $200 special from OfficeMax hurts after a year of use.
I have a Leap at work and love it (we also have a few Think chairs, but having worked in one all day, I prefer the Leap).
I’m based in SF, so we bought our work chairs from Rucker Fuller a couple of months ago, and we are very happy with the them. Unfortunately when I called last week to buy a chair for home, I was told it would be several weeks at least for a Leap…
When I worked for the corporate HQ of Whole Foods Market, all of us got one of the Herman Miller Mirra chairs when we moved to the new (2004) building. They definitely are nice, and I had few complaints (the only real one being the armrests popped from one position to another too easily).
Conversely, they stuck us all in these low-walled cubicles which totally sucked. To add insult to injury, they sought to mask all the noise from people on phones, miscellaneous talking, etc. with these really annoying white noise generators. So, for Whole Foods - big kudos for spending good money on good chairs; boo, hiss for putting employees in day-care style cubicles and pummeling them with white noise.
in my humble opinion, the best office chair if you also care about relaxing your head from time to time is Vitra’s Headline chair. Best recliner I ever tried. Even when reclining, your head always stays looking forward instead of upward. Lots of clever engineering went into it, like designing a new kind of cusion fabric (3d mesh).
Have you heard the story that Steve Jobs went looking for the right washing machine for 3 weeks with his familiy? Well if he ever would have searched for the best office chair that intensively, this would have been the chair that he ended up with
