Recession is still going on in both Canada and USA (there are reports that even way beyond those two) and there are many speculations in media about what needs to be done to fix things. Naturally, businesses everywhere are trying to reduce cost of production and streamline processes. Experts are digging up for hidden obstacles that prevent productivity to get unfolded in its full grace. Some findings of those experts are unexpected. For example, as many newspapers and media giants like CNN reported, obesity. Obesity of workforce is a barrier for US economy, they say, to achieve productivity levels needed for getting off the recession hook.
When I shared news with a friend of mine, she was somewhat puzzled how obesity can be such a serious issue for productivity (while being a serious issue for other reasons of course) if all manufacturing is primarily done outside of North America. In a way, that make sense. It is possible to picture how obese worker can produce less in his shift than his lean counterpart somewhere in South East Asia where reportedly many manufacturing jobs were outsourced. But in service industry, office environment it is less imaginable. Obese person can type on computer keyboard as fast as non-obese. The same applicable to phone conversations, car driving etc. They say productivity loss is due to lost workdays by medical reasons too but obesity does not look in that regards as some kind of significant exception - when fall comes, every office experiences the same wave of lost workdays when employees are dealing with cold and flu.
At the same time, I don't want to pretend that I understand much in macroeconomic studies. There are many things in the world that do look improbable but they are true. Those studies most likely have solid stats and math behind it and, after all, there are still some manufacturing jobs left in North America. I guess mere facts that I live in Vancouver and work in software development industry kind of distorting my perception of the problem. There are not too many obese people in our city and almost none in the industry.
That brings actually a strange observation - not only software developers but IT people in whole are fairly lean individuals in general. I saw armies of them in college, then in BCIT where different seminars organized by IT companies are held and at multiple industry events like those large and pompous Microsoft happenings in downtown. They are very often skinny and sometimes not incredibly athletic. But almost never obese or close to being obese.
Why is that? There are evidences that brain is the most voracious consumer of energy in human body. If you write code you need to let your brain to consume the energy at extremely high levels. Writing code can be a very exhausting process mentally and, strangely enough, physically. After intense sessions of coding, debugging or even researching, I feel sometimes like I finished Marathon distance - tired and hungry. Overall speaking, the same is applicable to writing in general, not just coding but, say, blogging or essaying.
Saying that, by the way, I am not trying to say that software developers are smartest individuals on the planet (well, some of them pretty close to it I guess - Scott Guthrie of Microsoft for example). There is no definitive correlation between thinking hard while producing code and quality of produced code. Sometimes hours can be spent without any descent output delivered.
At the same time I knew quite smart individuals who don't look like those who practice yoga on regular basis. One guy, expert in numbers theory, whom I knew from university years, looked like the kid from the animated movie "Up!".
In a long run, I would say, obesity as a productivity preventer will be removed as obstacle. It may happen because life style and food habits of people in North America are shifting to better. Chances also are that IT people will continue to stay lean. And hopefully Starbucks will not discontinue its Fruit&Grain bar - great product to maintain productivity while staying skinny.
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