Re: Investing in a Quality Programming Chair

Jeff,
You are making a monumental mistake to revisit this again. A better chair will not increase your productivity, it'll keep you a slave to the tools. Next up: best programming keyboard, best programming mouse, next year you'll have a review of the best programming music. If you go down this road, there's only one way out: $500 gold-plated ethernet cables.

While you are not down to audiophile level stupidity consumerism, you are close. If you go down this road your productivity will drop as you blame the lack of tools, ie "My laptops keyboard sucks, can't code with it right now, will wait until I can dock it". If you go down this road you'll stop enjoying your passion. You'll become like Steve Kindig, sr. audiophile reviewer, who can't listen to his ipod for "extended periods" and can't "haul [his] system and listening room" for high quality music.

If you go down this road you'll rob yourself of the enjoyment. But there is salvation: Next time you sin, force yourself off your rig, sit down with pencil and paper, and write the damn code out. The rest of the world is doing just fine without the "Best X for Y" crap. Here's how the rest of the world does it: Wooden chair, 15" CRT monitor, cheap desktop tower. The U.S. hosts about 600,000 programmers, there are about 12,000,000 worldwide. You don't see them bitching about the chairs.

My mother plays a certain kind of sport, She's this years U.S national champion in the sport. This sport uses a certain kind of tool. She emigrated from a lesser endowed, country. Her tools are old, cheap by current U.S. standards. And yet, to my shock and amazement, when I looked up blogs discussing her: They were not talking about training, they were wondering about her tools. They were wondering what she was using, what brand was her (tool1), what production model was (tool2). I was floored. That was an important lesson for me. Both my parents are in this field, and they always say, the key is PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE, CONCENTRATE, RELAX, NOT TOOLS. Stop being a slave to the ubiquitous consumerism. Start focusing on your work.

Edit: (a couple people noted I misread the post and what Jeff meant by "disenchanted" with the association with dot-bombs, thus I'm striking out the last part.)
And here's the last WTF with your article: You are wasting another $500-$1000 for another chair simply because it's associated "with dot-com excess".
Let's make an analogy of it, shall we:

Me: I'm replacing my Maserati
Ed: Why? Is it broken?
Me: No!
Ed: Is it too large/small for you?
Me: No!
Ed: Can't afford gasoline?
Me: No, Maserati cars are associated with blacks. WTF(!)
(sorry for the race analogy, but I've personally witnessed similar arguments regarding luxury silverware)