Ask Slashdot: What Is the Best Position To Work For Long Hours?

New submitter damitr asks: "What is the most ergonomic position if you are working with a laptop or a desktop (with or without wireless keyboard and mouse) for long hours at stretch? Is bean bag for sitting with a laptop a good option? What is the best way to use a desktop without causing tennis elbow and backache/neck problems?"

Comments

Standing Desk setup

[Bananatree3]

Here is a log of a 3-week experiment using a stand up desk. FYI for comparison.

Long hours coding are best avoided.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Most comments here talk about taking breaks to do minor calisthenics to keep the circulation and other minor ailments away. Or about eye strain etc. But one of the most important thing doing the heavy lifting during coding is the brain. And one has to rest and sharpen the brain too. Long hours are brutal on the brain. Brain during waking hours keeps lots and lots of stuff in local temporary memory. These experiences and lessons must be transcribed to long term storage. That happens during the sleep. Continuing long hours without sleep will dull your brain and the code will be buggy. I have my pet theory almost all the bugs are coded in between 1 PM and 3 PM, when the body is digesting lunch and brain wants to go to sleep. So try to work at least a power nap in it. Slogging for long hours without break would lead to very low productivity near the end.

This is especially true while debugging. Only when you stop looking at code start thinking about something else things work out. Countless number of times, I log out at 5PM to catch the 5:15 trolley, while walking back thinking about "pick dry cleaning, running low on coffee but can last another day, today is karate class day for the kid.." it would suddenly strike me, "wait a minute, in this function I am deleting invalid bodies, but the caller's caller of this function is looping through the body list, that is why the grandparent's loop is crashing in the next increment of the loop index". Such things have happened so many times. I think coding is done in many small bursts of activity with lots of thinking in between. Long coding sessions are not likely to be very productive.