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Comment by corimaith | Hacker News Reader

The cost of a good office chair is comparable to a top tier gaming pc, if not higher.

Not for an enterprise buying (or renting) furniture in bulk it isn’t. The chair will also easily last a decade and be turned over to the next employee if this one leaves… unlike computer hardware which is unlikely to be reused and will historically need to be replaced every 24-36 months even if your dev sticks around anyway.

> computer hardware which is unlikely to be reused and will historically need to be replaced every 24-36 months

That seems unreasonably short. My work computer is 10 years old (which is admittedly the other extreme, and far past the lifecycle policy, but it does what I need it to do and I just never really think about replacing it).

> My work computer is 10 years old... but it does what I need it to do and I just never really think about replacing it

It depends what you're working on. My work laptop is 5 years old, and it takes ~4 minutes to do a clean compile of a codebase I work on regularly. The laptop I had before that (which would now be around 10 years old) would take ~40 minutes to compile to the same codebase. It would be completely untenable for me to do the job I do with that laptop (and indeed I only started working in the area I do once I got this one).

Right, the employee with unlimited spend would want to sit in a used chair.

That’s more or less my point from a different angle: unlimited spend isn’t reasonable and the justification “but $other_thing is way more expensive!” Is often incorrect.

An Aeron chair that's not been whacked with baseball bats looks pretty much the same after many, many years.

Are there any FANG employers unwilling to provide good office chairs? I think even cheap employers offer these.

I think my employer hed a contest to see which of 4 office chairs people liked the most, then they bought the one that everyone hated. I’m not quite sure anymore what kind of reason was given.

There are many that won’t even assign desks, much less provide decent chairs. Amazon and LinkedIn are two examples I know from personal experience.

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