RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury) is the bogeyman of software developers’ worst nightmares. I think everyone knows someone, or of someone, who was once a great programmer and is now a primary teacher, porter or some such, and all because of this RSI thing. So here’s my experience, because it came true and happened to me.

My experience

I have typed for in excess of ten hours a day, for weeks at a time, at a number of times in my life. Since graduating three years ago I’ve worked exclusively in development of different kinds. Since long before that I have been able to touch type and took jobs as a temporary secretary and typist during my university holidays. So I’ve had a fair amount of exposure to serious typing requirements in the past and no problems.

I first noticed a problem about three months after starting a new job, I had aches and tingles in my fourth and little fingers in both hands. This turned into a feeling of having my hands attached to my arms wrongly – I kept trying to “click” my wrist joints into place all the time and it was getting quite painful. We do have funny furniture at work since the company’s main business is manufacturing furniture, unfortunately not for offices¹, and I just couldn’t make it fit me.

I requested a review of my workstation and over the next few weeks a series of people came and measured the space, prodded me and my chair around, fidgeted with my keyboard and generally wrung their hands in despair. It took five weeks for any modification to be made to my desk and by that time I was on some very strong anti-inflammatory medication following a diagnosis of tendonitis and eventually had to call in sick for a few days as my hands were so painful I couldn’t even put the mon the keyboard. I’d like to point out at this stage that I am not in any way criticising my employer, my work area is hard to modify and it is a large organisation which by definition means that it takes time for the bureaucracy to get its internal cogs turning.

When I went to see the doctor I had pains in my fingers, wrists, elbows and also kind of between the two bones in my arm (like what you get after playing badminton when you haven’t for ages). I also lost all grip in my hands, I couldn’t get the top of a bottle of milk or squash or hold anything heavy (like a pan of water). It was horrible but he assured me that I was unlikely to suffer lasting damage and prescribed anti-inflammatories and as much rest as was possible. By this time I wasn’t posting to this site, working on any of my other coding projects, or even doing any crochet. Even holding a book to read was quite painful!

After my desk had been modified, my hands immediately became much less painful although discomfort remains today (two months later). My employer had me see their doctor and he advised that the damage to the tendons was likely to take some time to recover and I might expect some discomfort for a couple of months. In fact this is the case and I am now finding that an ordinary wrist support helps quite a bit, but my hands are painful after a few days of typing. Coding and sql-querying are much worse than straightforward prose, such as this article, I think because the keyboard is laid out to make words easy and punctuation not necessarily so!

At home I use the laptop and sit wherever I like – usually on my feet, sounds daft but I’ve coded for years curled into a ball and it seems to work! I use an external shallow action keyboard (like a laptop one, the keys don’t go down very far) placed on my knee on a cushion which seems to bring it to a comfortable height. I use Opera which can be controlled pretty much entirely from the keyboard, its got plenty of keyboard shortcuts and also spatial link navigation where you just hold down shift and press the arrow keys to navigate a page’s links. Its great and means I don’t have to use a mouse – I don’t think its the mouse that’s the problem but switching between the two certainly provokes a twinge.

In Conclusion

Well I’ll update this article as things improve but for now I think its enough to say that I’m still programming and feel that I can continue to do so as a full-time occupation. I am still suffering the same pains but I was warned it might take time to heal so fingers crossed (I can still do that!) that’s all it is. I wanted to write about this as its a big issue for programmers and other keyboard-users and I really felt I benefitted from their stories and honesty. I almost feel like the whole thing was a bad dream, and hopefully that’s all it will be in the future – just a dream.

¹ Actually we make kitchens, bedrooms and bathrooms, so the offices are miscellaneous drawers with a kitchen worktop on top – it works a lot better than it sounds!

Well, not an actual tale, exactly, but some general anecdotes.

Since moving “oop north” (to Leeds, West Yorkshire, UK), my partner and I have job-hunted once each. Once for me when I relocated up here, and once for him just at the moment as the fixed-term contract that brought him here in the first place has ended. In both instances, we’ve ended up with two good offers and no real way of choosing between them.

The trouble with jobs is that you can never really know how they will turn out until you’ve been there six months. This isn’t an option when you have 24 hours to make a decision that will affect your day-to-day life for the next two years or so, so how can you pick?

Criteria for choosing

This can be straightforward. If you have large credit card or mortgage payments to keep up with, or an expensive habit like an extreme sport, then probably you want the one with the biggest paycheck. If one job is a step on the ladder or uses skills for a job you want to do one day, then take it, even if its less money. If one job is an hour-long commute and the other is a walk across the park, question yourself whether any benefit from the further one can outweight the sense of self you will lose from that kind of journey. If the recruiter annoys you enough then you might allow that to help you decide (I have turned down interviews before purely because I couldn’t face talking to the recruiter again!). If one company is straight with you and calls when they say they will, then that will probably give you a good feeling that you mean what you say the rest of the time. If you just have a good feeling about one job, environment or set of people, then follow your instinct – in this case that is your best indicator.

Once you’ve made your choice, train your brain to stop wondering “what if”? Even if the job you chose doesn’t work out the way you wanted, you get there and the people who were so friendly when you were shown round seem to have had their personalities surgically removed, or the training and development policies have been allowed to mysteriously evaporate, you must never wonder what might have been. For down that path leads despair.

Difficult choices

Personally, I couldn’t really tell you why I chose the way I did this time around. The two jobs used different subsets of my skill set and neither had any obvious progression with them although both would be great stepping stones for when I grow up and decide what I want to be. I can give lots of pros and cons for either choice. Wake up in the morning, and see what you feel, then act on it immediately. After six months in this job, its working out OK, and who’s to say what would have happened if I’d chosen differently? It is our instinct to think that we might be missing out, that the grass is greener elsewhere, that’s what makes us take risks and move on to the next place at all!

I spoke to a guy in a bar last night who told me that when he left university, he’d had two job offers – one for a web company and one for a games company. The web company offered more money and he took that job, but he’s always wondered what it would have been like to make games for a living. My advice: just don’t wonder! [1]

¹ Actually I told him he had made the right choice, I did work in games for a while and although it was fun, it is hard work and totally different to the “normal” software industry, I’m glad I did it but I’m also glad I’m doing something else now.