Post date:
A short PSA before we jump in: sitting for prolonged periods of time is bad for you, period. A quality ergonomic chair won’t make it beneficial, it will merely reduce the amount of damage incurred.
At the end of last year I started having some back issues and as a well trained consumer I was certain they would be best addressed by purchasing an expensive office chair. These situations typically put me into obsessive research mode, so I figured I’d document lessons learned in the process.
I usually start by searching for reviews and discussions, which wasn’t as easy as you’d expect. Like mattresses, ergonomic chairs fall in the category of health products, which means advertising materials are full of pseudo-scientific statements and dramatic illustrations (This image of a swollen red spine is what happens when you sit in a regular chair).
It’s difficult to find in-depth reviews that test chairs for longer periods, directly compare them to competing models and verify health-related claims instead of just regurgitating them. For example: some people will try to sell you the healing powers of sitting on an exercise ball (or better yet, an expensive active sitting chair like Spinalis). While they may be good for occasional users, they aren’t the best for developers. They’re like standing desks - a great supplement to your routine, but not a full-time replacement.
One of the best resources I stumbled upon was the blog of Tomasz P. Szynalski. The man is a legend - he not only wrote exhaustive blog posts on buying an office chair and preventing back problems, but also systematically reviewed a bunch of high-end options himself. Other useful articles were this roundup on Wirecutter and this long-running thread on Slo-Tech.
Most web shops don’t ship internationally because of the weight and I wanted to avoid any future warranty issues, so buying locally was the only option. The following chairs were available for purchase and ended up on my shortlist:
You should ideally trial your future chair in realistic conditions; by working in it for at least a few days. This is unfortunately not a level of service available in Slovenia, so I had to settle for testing chairs in showrooms and bugging a friend or two to try theirs out. It’s difficult to stress how important this step was; reading about chairs on the internet helped narrow things down, but I would have made a really bad choice if I didn’t actually sit in them. Make sure you put it under your ass before committing.
For me, the deciding factor turned out to be my height. I’m about six foot four and during testing I often felt like: 1. the seat can’t be raised to a sufficient height 2. the back rest isn’t long enough to support my entire back. Steelcase Please best addressed both of these issues, scored high marks in Tomasz’s rigorous testing mentioned above and simply felt subjectively comfortable.
The chair ended up costing 813 EUR in the desired configuration (standard fabric, no head rest, fancier 4-way arm rests) and was delivered about a month after the completed payment. Long waiting times are allegedly due to them being made to order, not sure if that’s a general Steelcase thing or just the Slovenian distributor not keeping any configurations in stock. For some strange reason my Please initially came with extremely high-tension wheels that made it very difficult to push around, which wasn’t a big deal as the distributor replaced them on-site after my complaint, no questions asked.
After putting it to the test with her own butt the wife decided she also wouldn’t mind having one of these, but was absolutely appalled by the price, so we ended up ordering the second one from 2ndhnd, a UK web shop selling used office furniture. The decision wasn’t without compromise - it looked a bit banged up, was sloppily reupholstered and had a stuck lumbar support tension knob. Luckily these are high end chairs built to last, so it’s still doing its job perfectly, especially considering the price was about a third of a new one.
Perhaps most importantly: the back pain didn’t magically go away, it even worsened for a while as the new chair forced me into a more proper posture. The ultimate solution was boring and obvious - lifestyle changes and more exercise.