Do Software Engineers Love Potato?

Do you love french fries? How about mashed potato with cheese? Smoked potato chips?

I personally love everything about potato, be it a crispy old-fashioned potato cake or a top-notch potato launcher — a hilarious invention that could easily stand beside Elon Musk’s Flamethrower.

The question I’m about to study in this post is if software engineers love potato (like I do)? “Why engineers?” you may ask. Well, we need to start somewhere, don’t we? An engineer who works for an agile software development company contributes to a better future for all of us. Does potato have anything to do with that? Let’s see.

A quick look at the top potato-producing states brings us to Idaho as the number one potato producer. Apparently, 30.51% of the total potato grown in the US is from this state. Well done, Idaho! And thank you, Statista, for this valuable data. Please note, Washington is the second in the race, and California went all the way to the 9th place.

This is the chart with potato places. What about software engineers? I almost see you’re screaming “In Silicon Valley, dude!” And you are right, folks.

Thanks to very much appreciated effort of Daxx (they’ve done the head counting, you can see the results in the chart below), we now know that the prevailing number of programmers prefer living in California.

Can you find Idaho in this chart? No, you can’t, and neither can I.

You may notice the state of Washington at the end of the list though. Almost 144k programmers still have to live in Washington, languish, suffer, gain weight, while others fled from this #2 potato heaven.

I was wondering what could make California so attractive for engineers? The answer came from Hass Avocado Board on the Washington Post. It’s avocado, guys! According to HAB, California is the leading state of avocado consumption per annum with LA leading the ranking.

Is it possible that avocado is the holy grail that attracts the engineers to this state? Could avocado be the secret ingredient of technological progress? If you run the numbers, it seems it could.

Thanks to avocado, Elon Musk has shot Tesla roadster into space, self-driving cars have been hanging around and today’s toilet seats have more features and perks than our computers back at the beginning of the millennium.

So eat your daily avocado, folks, and stay tuned with Digiteum for further updates from the mysterious IT world.