venta

So, we were in The Roebuck on friday lunchtime. It was

thegreenman's leaving do, so there was a good number of people there. And someone said... "isn't it odd that all programmers drink real ale?"

"Eh?" we said.

A quick glance round the pub revealed that in the pub there were:

A couple of people with soft drinks.
One cider drinker, she was ruled not to count on account of being a graphic artist.
One person with unidentified fizzy beverage, but she was marketing anyway.
One screaming wuss (and self-confessed lout) with lager.
The remaining twenty or so all had real ale (Pintwatch, incidentally, very much approves of Greene King IPA at £1.60 a pint).

So, the poll yesterday was intended to answer the question "Do all programmers drink beer?"

And the answer appears to be no, not all of them. The side issue was, of course, were the statistics being skewed because the majority of programmers are blokes, and real ale is still mostly seen as a guys' drink.

According to the answers to the poll, and taking "is a programmer" to mean "works in the IT industry" (there were so few people who had non-techie IT jobs, that it didn't seem worth differentiating):

Programmers: 44% drink ale (Of girls: 50% drink ale. Of guys: 42% drink ale)
Everyone else: 30% drink ale (Of girls: 22% drink ale. Of guys, 36% drink ale)

So slightly higher among the techies.

However, there were also more lager drinkers among the programmers than the non-programmers, so you could argue that among the people who drink beer-esque drinks, there's actually a lower percentage of ale-drinking programmers. Mind you, all the bloody techie goths drinking cider doesn't exactly help.

So... I dunno. The answers are viewable to all, if anyone fancies mungeing the figures some more and proving something interesting, or drawing nice charts, or doing Wilcoxon significance testing... There's got to be a PhD in this for someone somewhere :)