Classic Gerald Weinberg Essay Reprinted

danielread writes "Programmer abuse has been a popular topic recently, especially within the gaming industry. However, excessive overtime and overwork are not new problems for software professionals. Twenty years ago, acclaimed author Gerald Weinberg wrote an essay called 'Personal Chemistry and the Healthy Body,' which is as relevant for programmers today as it was two decades ago. Given this topic's recent resurgence, Mr. Weinberg was generous enough to let developer.* Magazine reprint this classic essay."

Comments

Re:Alternatives?

[dubl-u]

They might have a more normal social experience, but they'd also likely sacrifice the uniqueness that their antisocial position has manifested that resulted in superior coding and design.

Those interested in the relationship between "normal" mentality and things like creativity or productivity will enjoy reading these books:

• Tocuhed With Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament , a look by a bipolar psychiatrist at the close relationship between creativity and mental illness,
• Thinking In Pictures and Other Reports from My Life with Autism , a memoir by an autistic woman describing her unusual mentality and the life that resulted from it, and
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time , a hugely enjoyable book written from the point of view of a boy with autism.

All present interesting portraits of people who are far from normal and wouldn't have it any other way. The second one is especially relvant to the Slashdot crowd as it covers people with Asperger's Syndrome and explicitly recommends computing as a career for the autistic.

All of these made me once again question the current medical viewpoint that treats a pretty narrow range of capability and behavior as normal, and everything else to be medicatable. Especially after reading Thinking in Pictures, it was easy for me to imagine a world where the geek/autism range was normal, and the excessively social minority was encouraged to take medication to help them stop obsessing over trival details of other people's lives.

Of course, I live in San Francisco, where between the artists, the geeks, and the outright freaks, we're not far away from that anyhow. Just last month the city council voted, more or less, to rename the Bay Bridge for our patron saint of weirdness, Emperor Norton the First.

Re:Alternatives?

[Stween]

Your first link appears to be an unforunate copy of the second. Corrected here:

Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament

Re:Whatever Happened to Unions?

[Tablizer]

and the unwillingness of domestic labor to take realistic salaries

Salaries are generally not negotiable. They are paid based on perceptions, not on supply-and-demand bidding. I bid real low once to get my foot into a new technology. It did not work.

I'm not sure how capping input into law schools prevents foreign lawyers; you do not need to have gone to law school to take the bar.

The BAR is a quota (protection) technique also.

In the form of rationed work visas, rationed immigration, domestic contract quotas, laws governing foreign work distribution, taxes, tariffs, incentives and programs, we have that protection.

Are you suggesting we let every Tom, Dick, and Hari in? Why bother then to have "citizens"? Plus, other countries usually have very strict work visa systems. They don't swing open their gates, so why should we do the same?