Able Bodied Twenty Five Year Old Male Assumption

from PairProgrammingErgonomics:

My concern was more that the partners might have equally important, but mutually exclusive, ergonomic requirements... -- MichaelFinney

For me the above is a critical point. I'm 55; almost everyone above 40 is presbyopic to some degree, and it's progressive. I have a pair of "tube glasses" I use at the terminal and nowhere else and a progressive-polyfocal pair that I use for everything else. With the tube glasses, I have a working range of distance from the screen that's the optimal distance plus or minus about two inches. Additionally, because of some brachial-plexus troubles, I've been ordered, by an ergonomically savvy doctor, to set things up so that the top of my screen is at or below eye level. It's not that unusual a setup, but there is one additional thing that it does require: I absolutely have to be on, or very near, the view-in-plan centerline of display, keyboard, etc. in order for it to work. Take me very far off axis, and I can't do anything, nor see what someone else is doing.

I guess what's really chewing at me is that getting old isn't all that unusual (you hope!), and that ideally my trade shouldn't acquire a set of assumptions that turn it, implicitly at least, into a "young man's game."

That said, it seems to me that "slaving" one workstation to another, via VNC ( VirtualNetworkComputing ), Remote Admin, or something similar--many of the which are cheap, or else free--might work, in practice, far better than a draconian insistence on "two developers, one workstation." That draconian insistence would mean frustration, pain, and very likely physical injury for some of us--and our name is legion.

And do remember, even if none of these physical vicissitudes have yet connected with you, that they will eventually. If you plan on doing software at or past that point, it is not too soon to start worrying about approaches that are exclusive in their effect; at some point you are switched from being able to joke about Achilles' choice to realizing that it is no longer yours to make. -- AnonymousDonor

Who reads the classics these days? Achilles' choice: whether to become famous through great deeds but die young, or live long and happy in obscurity. (The Odyssey; Trojan War)

"Wanted: Young, skinny, wirey fellows not over 18. Must be expert riders willing to risk death daily. OrphansPreferred. Wages $25 per week." (Pony Express advertisement, 1860)

The fixes:

Lower the table.
All chairs are fully adjustable, outside the range of normal chairs. And lose the armrests. Active programmers never rest arms on them, anyway. No, use chairs with short (or detachable) armrests. Besides, the passenger half in PairProgramming might want a place to rest the arms.
Dual keyboards & mice.
Optimally drive the monitor. Make the pixels as small as possible (without losing full color), then set the definition of an inch to >120 pixels per inch. Then configure all configurable fonts to a comfortably large setting. Modern monitors are big enough that we don't need cramped text anymore anyway.