Unfortunately with the increase of offshore outsourcing (or decrease of onshore jobs) I can see how many companies doesn't even think of upgrading the chair or the computer. Why would they? It would defeat all the savings they aquired by hiring cheap outsourced workforce.

I see this at the company I work for when they squeeze 10-15 people in a room once used by 2 people and maximize their time.

I can only tell you this. I am glad I don't have to be a developer anymore and I feel really bad for those developers.

As a development manager, I agree with the blog post. A happy developer is a productive developer, and maintaining an aggressive balance of both quality and productivity is key to running a good development shop. The only exception is on choice of dev tools. That decision is made at a strategic level for many reasons, and delegating it out to each individual developer is a recipe for disaster. I agree that tool choice should be current and "the right tools for the right job", but that is management's responsibility - not each developer. The risk is that team development efforts would be fragmented with different technologies, increasing support and maintenance complexity. Otherwise, I agree with the extra "perks" of 2 monitors, good quality chair, fast PC and premium KVM. And music is not a perk - it's a god-given right (for management too :)

The "Programmer Bill Of Rights" makes a few valid points about the positive impact that environment can have on productivity, but the sense of entitlement with which it is written smacks of a "Glass House" mentality that I thought we stamped out of IT decades ago.

The Bill-of-Right's productivity points are valid about any employee that has a more cerebral than physical job - there's nothing special about IT jobs as compared to an actuary in insurance, business strategists, and other thinking positions.

As to tools - the author misses the point of tools - we use different tools for different jobs. While workers should have the tools (note plural) necessary to work efficiently, refusing to use anything other than .Net is technical elitism at its worst. Stop resume-building and start business-enabling, which is why developers have jobs in the first place.

If a job-candidate's first questions aren't about the business, the challenge, and other topics that make it clear the candidate is more interested in the company than the perks - as the hiring manager, I would end the conversation and wish the candidate luck elsewhere.