Well, I am gonna talk about something that is commonly discussed among software professionals and their parents - deterioriating health of software professionals.  In India everything spreads fast be it epidemic, population, hot trends in jobs etc.,  With India almost completing 10 years of employment in software companies (although it started as early as 80s, I consider the hard core IT Companies more or less came in the late nineties or atleast aggresively recruited people during this period) there are millions of software professionals out there in the country.

 

Its common nowadays for a father / mother saying that my son is a software engineer as compared my son is an engineer/doctor, during the yester years.  Every year candidates from all forms of engineering (be it mechanical, instrumental, chemical) enter into software industry.  Many of them with the passion to work on the silicon chip, most of them behind one of the following reasons

 

1. Job trend

2. Parents forcing them

3. Money / Foreign Opportunities (wonder where the term "onsite" came from, must be from this industry)

4. High standards of life, night life, opportunity to work with opposite gender closely etc.,

 

Well, I am not abusing them, in India, everything works like Idly Shops.  If there is an Idly Shop running good business in a street, there will be 10 of them coming up there.

 

Ok, coming back to the main thread, with millions of software professionals out there, the common health problems arising are

 

1. Obesity

2. Stress

3. Young age heart attacks

4. Physical Disorders including indigestion

5. Eye Sight, Muscular diseases

Reasons

 

1.  Burn Outs due to excess working

2.  Uneven diet habits

3.  Too much of junk food

4.  Constantly staring the monitor (while I type this, my eyes are burning)

5.  Sitting all through the day

 

Solution

 

1. Dont accept to work more than 10 hours a day even if your lead / manager demands to.  At the end of the day productive work can be done only for 8-9 hours and the rest who slog just hang around

2. Stick to regular eating habits and avoid missing breakfast (one of the primary causes of heart attack)

3. You are not going to listen to me but try avoiding junk food (look whoz grabbing pizza)

4. Give relaxation to eyes and see whatever pleases your eyes (it can be greenery or the girl with green dress sitting next to you)

5. Try standing and coding for some time.  If you are in a closed cabin, try dancing for 5 min, jumping, running within the cabin etc.,

 

Well, these are my little tit bits to have somewhat healthy life for software professionals.  At the end of the day, stay healthy to code better.

 

Cheers,

Harish.