The Ballmer Peak: An Empirical Search
This paper was published in this year’s issue of sigbovik, the best satirical academic journal you (may) have never heard of: https://sigbovik.org/2024/
Guess we need to do a follow on study, what a way to use the R&D budget. I don't think I will be short of volunteers.
I look forward to publishing the differing effects of XXXX Gold vs Stone & Wood in order for us to optimise the department budget. However I will be waiting for further research before starting trials of Bundy Rum. I am concerned the development efficiency will be offset by repairing punched screens.
Of course the finding from this paper of the optimality of slightly less than two drinks has long been known to certain elite segments of society[0].
I suspect it’s somewhat dependent on the starting mental state. ie might benefit someone who is tense more than someone that is relaxed.
I could totally see the relaxing effect outweighing the impairment for someone tense
We had a cocktail afternoon at the last company I worked for.
I had some brilliant ideas after drinking, but looking at the code sober next day revealed, I wasn't brilliant.
The biochemistry suggests there might be a thing. Alcohol slows down brain activity. This may seem like it would make coding harder but if your brain is racing and thinking of too many things at once then this slowing mean the brain starts to, with a task manager analogy, stop a bunch of extraneous tasks. This means you can focus more. The trade off is that you also have less CPU power for that task. But, many coding activities aren't that hard and so the increased focus more than counteracts the loss of power. The trick is staying in that very narrow band of blood alchohol where this holds. Too much more and the loss of brain power means the coding tasks will not go well at all.
In the same spirit, as mentioned in the abstract of the paper:
The relationship between alcohol and programming performance is interesting enough that I actually skimmed through the paper and tried to figure out how legit it was.
Sadly there's only one test subject.
So basically this is a report of somebody drinking a couple glasses of alcohol and then went on to practice leetcode questions...
The xkcd comic about the Ballmer Peak: https://xkcd.com/323/
A little drink always temporarily removes my sour temper and everything else gets improved.
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Incredibly self-serving paper.