Monday, October 11, 2010

Obesity and software developers

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.

Sunday, October 3, 2010

Kafka and iPhone

Although my prime occupation is related to technology, my personal relationships with various technologies can be described in terms of Kafkaesque ambivalence: I don't really crave that much for being up to date when it comes to latest gadgets or cool services like Twitter but I push myself hard enough to get the latest when working on a concrete web project. Due to that peculiar fact my personal arsenal of available innovations gets updated rarely and almost always not by me.

That's probably why I have got iPhone only now, long after hysterical tsunami of iPhonification got subsided (well, unless you don't consider iPad as some kind of variation on iPhone theme). My wife bought it for me so I would stay better connected with the world. That made sense for my old cell phone was as ancient as the one you could see in the sequel of "Wall Street" when Michael Douglas receives back his personal items at the very beginning.

I have to admit - all that iPhone hysteria is not entirely baseless. iPhone is really cool piece of electronic engineering. Touch screen provides with shockingly new experience for those who relied solely on keyboard and mouse for the last decade or so. Numerous iPhone apps and bells and whistles can make anybody feel deeply entertained and in a way powerful. But for me personally the greatest revelation was its book store, iBook.

That's not to say that I never bought and read electronic books before. I have Kindle and did quite a bit of reading on it. But my Kindle compared to iPhone is like medieval arquebus to M-16. Reportedly, such comparison is not totally alien to Amazon.com executives for as per news from media Amazon.com purchased a hi-tech company in New York to develop its own touch screen technology in response to Apple's challenge.

The ease with which one can read and leaf through iBook is very addictive. Moreover, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that a great deal of classic literature available at iBook store free of charge. Majority of them are made available via Gutenberg Project. I was able to download and peruse books I did not open since early childhood, those like "Treasure Island" and "Black Arrow" by Stevenson, or "The Hound of the Baskervilles" by Conan Doyle, or "Ivanhoe" by Walter Scott. Reading it in English, recollecting its Russian translation read far away and long ago, comparisons and finding familiar details was increadible fun.

One author though was of special interest for me - Franz Kafka. Some of his books are also available as free downloads for both iPhone and Kindle. Nevertheless, I went extra mile and bought "The Metamorphosis" with a great deal of comments and data on author for something like $2.99. I did start reading that story on computer sometime ago (at really good website of ReadPrint.com) but never had a chance to complete reading due to lack of spare time. iPhone is making now possible for me to fill that embarrassing literary hole in my not so classical education. I read whenever I have a moment. Even in the line up in Starbucks.

Reading Kafka makes me feel kind of delirious; reading about his life makes me delirious and sad. His family ended up terribly in flames of WWII. He himself died of hunger at a quite young age (not of the lack of food but due to some complication with his throat). His final will to have all his writings to be burned unread is equally delirious and sad. Reading Kafka on iPhone inevitably brings up an idea that if iPhones were available in Kafka's time, sadness component maybe much smaller in his biography (I don't mind delirium of his writings though).

I was driving yesterday morning to work and saw some homeless dude pushing rusty shopping cart with his dirty belongings in front of him. He had easily recognizable Apple's headset under stained baseball cap. Apple's market penetration is almost absolute at this point. Nothing Kafkaesque about it though.