Angus Kidman31 May 2007, 7:25 AM
One thing was striking about today's Google Developer Day in Sydney: the attendees were fit and trim, compared to the fatties that normally waddle round Microsoft conferences.
 Thin, hip people everywhere: it's the new era of lightweight computing... |
Years of attending tech conferences have taught us a simple, if unpleasant lesson: technology enthusiasts tend to be a touch on the doughy, porky side, and developers doubly so.
The notion of geeks as sedentary creatures endlessly guzzling doughnuts and full-sugar cola might be a cliché, but, as far as we've seen -- over our own expanding gut -- it's an accurate one.
(Full-figure disclosure: APC's presence at these conferences is doing nothing to lower the average attendee weight numbers.)
Microsoft's annual Tech Ed is the ultimate demonstration of the problem, with the foyer pre-keynote generally resembling an audition for The Biggest Loser. Thin client technology this is not, but -- along with a a 90%+ likelihood that everyone involved will be male and wearing a T-shirt -- it seemed inevitable at a developer gabfest.
Or so we thought.
As we watched the crowds pour in to Google's Developer Day in Sydney, we quickly concluded that Google's success appears to be inversely proportional to the waistline of its developers.
Sure, most everyone was male, but immediately upon entering the room, the proportion of (frankly) fat slobs seemed a heck of a lot lower than at the last couple of Tech Eds we've attended.
The healthy attitude to eating also manifested itself in the food choices on offer. Both breakfast and afternoon tea were dominated by fruit, including some provocatively placed apples.
The choice of four options at lunch was also health-focused. There were four food stands, all named after cafes in the Mountain View, California Googleplex, offering pretty slimming food (there was a vegetarian choice at every single one, something we can't ever recall happening at a tech conference on any topic anywhere ever).
 Apples are not the only fruit: Google offers a range of options to keep its developers sticking to the diet. |
Why is this so? We bailed up Google's head of Corporate Affairs, Rob Shilkin and stuck a microphone in his face before he had a chance to decline to comment.
Shilkin wouldn't comment directly on whether Microsoft developers are fatter, but he was happy to explain why the conference had foregone the usual conference staples of buns, chips, biscuits and stodgy dishes involving potatoes, cheese and guacamole.
"There's a very well known theory about the Google 15, which is when someone joins Google, because we provide all our employees with lunches and great food, everyone puts on 15 pounds," Shilkin spun brilliantly to APC.
"So we're trying to make sure that the Google 15 stays in Google only, and doesn't go into the broader software community."
It's sort of a like carbon credit weight trading system. For every pound a Google employee gains, it's imperative for the company rebalance the world's overall flab quota by ensuring that it feeds healthy food to attendees of Google corporate events.
Other possible explanations for the end-user weight disparity include:
Microsoft developers earn more money and hence can eat more food. Clearly, quite a lot of the developers at the Google Sydney event were uni students, or only relatively recent entrants to the university of life. Extreme youth and relative poverty is an effective, if unpleasant, means of staying skinny. (To be fair, Microsoft also invites lots of students to Tech Ed, but they tend to be dwarfed by the sheer numbers of full-bodied, and full-salaried, paying attendees.)
Google pays to keep people out of burger joints. As key Google developer Lars Rasmussen said today, Google's Summer of Code program is known informally within the company as a way of paying students to "flip bits, not burgers" in their summer vacation.
Google developers are caring types. During the conference, Google executives made great play of the company's open source/caring and sharing/pseudo-hippie philosophy. Typical example from Rasmussen: "Google is very much about making the world a better place." People attracted to that world view often have a natural penchant for lentils and wheatgrass, thus minimising their risk of stomach stapling later in life.
The Google aesthetic. Google's sites have always been famously minimalist (unlike, for example, Windows "more frosted glass effects" Vista) and it's possible that this makes its technology naturally attractive to minimalist eaters.
People who code for the cloud have greater levity? This possible explanation was contributed by a professional at the event who joined in APC's interrogation of Rob Shilkin. It is utterly speculative, but if you are doing computing in the cloud, perhaps you need to preserve a natural lightness?
 Google waifs mill around: eating fruit, WTF?! |