Tuesday, March 05, 2013

Coders, Musicians and Cooks

In a light hearted Twitter exchange yesterday I asked why so many coders also played guitar. Mark Seemann suggested that there was also a high correlation with cooking.

code_play_cook_tweet

How about a survey? Mark and I have over 4000 twitter followers between us so I was sure we could get a few of them to click a few radio buttons, with no promise of reward, but with the warm feeling that they were helping to progress the anthropological understanding of the coding tribe. So I created a survey and waited for the results to stream in. Of course, as Rob Pickering pointed out, this kind of self selecting survey is very unscientific, but fun nonetheless.

What have we learnt?

  1. It is ridiculously easy to create an online survey using Google Drive. Just click ‘new form’, type in a few questions, and Bob’s yer uncle. It automatically builds a nice summary graphic on the fly as the survey progresses (see below).
  2. Most of Mark and I’s followers are C# coders. 81%. That’s not really surprising.
  3. More coders cook than play musical instruments: 85% verses 53%. That’s not really surprising either. I expect if you took a survey of the general population you’d find quite a high percentage who cook verses those who play.
  4. Guitar is by far the most popular instrument among coders. 30% play guitar. This confirms my hunch, but doesn’t answer my question – why it’s such a high percentage.

Here is the Google Drive graphic of the results.

code_play_cook_survey