The Ballmer Peak is a humorous concept invented by Randall Munroe in the xkcd webcomic, claiming that a programmer who is appropriately intoxicated can achieve a high level of productivity.
The concept loosely tied to former Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer,[1][2] and is likely a play on Balmer series of hydrogen spectral lines named for the scientist Johann Balmer.
[3] A San Francisco organization, Originate, has organized a “Ballmer Peak-A-Thon”, an open bar event where people were given “5 hours to find the elusive Ballmer peak, and build the best worst business possible.”[2][4] There is no scientific basis for the Ballmer Peak, though researchers have studied adjacent topics, such as the impact of inebriation on problem solving.
[5] In addition, the Ballmer Peak has been the subject of satirical academic studies, including a 2024 paper presented at SIGBOVIK, a satirical computer science conference organized by Carnegie Mellon students,[6] which caught broader attention in the programming community.
[7] That study, which tested blood alcohol levels of only one male subject tackling competitive computer programming questions, found no evidence of a sudden “peak” of programming ability but did generally find that speed of solving the challenges increased with some alcohol consumption before a rapid decline.