Craig Silverstein from Google is talking at ETech, he asks ‘how many of you would normally be asleep at this time (note this is 10:30 not 7:30). About one third of the people in the room put up their hands. Craig admitted that he normally got to work around noon.
Imagine if this had been a sales convention, if the talk had been at 5:30 in the morning and the same question were asked, there probably wouldn’t have been a single hand shown. So on the one hand the number of hands shown is a good measure of the geek factor of the crowd, but even more so, I suspect it is a measure of the ‘hacker factor’ i.e. the percentage of creative engineers.
It seems that there is a direct correlation between extraversion and morning people and introversion and night owls. There is also a connection between introversion and technologists.
Perhaps there is also a correlation between creativity and late risers. If classic introversion is not so much a measure of social inadequacy but being wrapped up in your own mind – this type of person is not likely to spring out of bed in the morning energized, but would rather hide under the covers wrapped up in his or her thoughts.