By Jo Best, 6 April 2006 15:20
NEWS
A doctor has warned of a number of ailments connected to IT workers' "geek lifestyle".
Posting on the health website Carotids.com, a physician known as Dr AA, a "Internal Medicine physician in a large rapidly expanding tech-growth community" and former programmer, reveals technology professionals can expect to be struck down by several IT-specific complaints.
The doctor says IT professionals can fall victim to backache, headaches, sleep problems and a poor attention span as a result of their chosen career.
According to the doctor, the issue of attention span is likely to have a particular resonance with "the geek population" due to the prevalence of born multi-taskers in the IT world, as well as the issue of how geeks train their minds.
"If I were to go and try to run a few miles this weekend, I would not be able to easily do so. My muscles are just out of shape from my lack of exercise over the last few months. However, if you take one of these college basketball athletes, any of them would be able to run miles without even breathing heavy. However, if you made them sit down and try to learn Java for 12 hours a day, most of them would be asleep at their desk before lunch," he says.
He adds that as a result of being trained to multitask, IT professionals will lose focus when forced to think about just one thing such as when sitting in a meeting, for example.
The doctor also offers some advice on how to correct some of the problems that typically affect IT workers for a bad back, make sure your chair and screen and positioned correctly, he suggests.
For those who can't get a good night's kip, the doctor warns against turning on a computer in bed, even during bouts of insomnia, as this further disturbs sleep patterns. "The bed should only be used for two things sex and sleep," he added.
Comments
There are 3 comments. Join the discussion
1. Roger Huffadine
Column inches in a slow news World - Of course techies get bored in meetings. The moron with the MBA who is running the meeting, firstly needs meetings to justify their job and secondly was taught that one must offer three options. The techie has a mind which runs 6 to 20 options to any one problem [ this is because Microsoft development tools are so poor and to make a PC do what you want you have to have many possible solutions] - so the techie has 6 to 20 solutions to the problem / scenario / that the bod at the front of the room is wailing about. Does the techie participate in the meeting? - not usually - why? - because generally, although one is told that all opinions are valid the only worked examples are the 3 that the MBA managed to think of and they don't want to explore any others - so - "I hear what you say" - or - "We should explore that option" become the standard brush offs. When everything screws up the 'MBA' says "We ran this past the techies" and the techies just have their standard grumble about the top corridor.
Yup - we find most 'managers' uninteresting and uninterested - so we tend to distract ourselves from the proceedings before we loose the will to live.
2. Steve Berry
I don't believe this "notion" of humans "multitasking" is valid.
Generally hunmans aren't very good at it (creates brain fragmentation) - it's best left to machines. Being asked to "multitask" is invariably the result of a poorly/rushed/hasty implemented series of business processes or Management who really don't understand the implications of what they're asking others to do.
If you look at any of the really successful large-scale software products, you can bet your bottom dollar that the business processes were created/implemented long before any developers ever got to doing "their bit". If it turns out that those processes cause problems for the people working under them ( i.e. rushing about like blue ***** flies or "multitasking" too heavily - particularly over long periods of time ) then the processes need to be looked at. The last thing that should be done is asking humans to "multitask" even more - tends to happen in environments where resources ( human and/or financial) at any given point in time are limited.
It continually saddens me when year after year I keep seeing the phrase "multitasking" along with others like "can-do" attitude ( what the **** does that actually mean ) ???
Anyone remember when Bill Gates once said businesses ( particularly in the UK ) are setting themselves/others up to fail ( which I agree with ) ? Try and understand the meaning behind what he was getting at and you *may* be on the way to a more "enlightened" life. ;)
3. George Dundon
Funny,
In Germany where medical insurance is the norm, IT people get some of the lowest cost medical insurance because they have generally low sickness. Are we looking at someone trting to make a name for themselves?