Poll: How late do you stay up?
The stereotype of a hacker would be to stay up into the wee hours, perhaps with the only light being the glow of the monitor. But is this the case? Please round to the nearest 2-hour multiple. (Let me know if you need more options.)
68 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 95.8 ms ] threadI honestly find that I focus the best in the mornings because everyone else is asleep and I don't have as many distractions.
One hacker I know, however, doesn't fit this list at all; he has a ~24-36 hour day (the second derivative of the length of his day is limited to about an hour, however). This means he might be sleeping in the middle of the day for everyone else.
On the plus side, i am now the strongest person at my workplace, which amuses me greatly. (Two guys will work together to pick up a 50" TV, I'll pick it up by myself just to freak them out, lol.)
How did you change your diet? I like the side-effects :)
Personally, when I was doing the 4AM hacking sessions, I was working on a million problems at once and trying to build rome in a day. Since switching to regular hours, I've learned to appreciate progress, small steps, and sustainable delivery, and have launched 3 side projects somewhat successfully (and higher quality).
Before I would waste time browsing news.yc, digg, watching videos and reading blogs/news.
Now I try to catch up on blogs whenever I have the chance and place more attention of developing stuff.
When you go to bed at 10pm you don't just trade a few night hours for morning hours, your entire schedule has to shift. Don't think that's worth it.
A normal 10pm bedtime does not preclude late nights now and then, anyhow.
3 out of 4 days Im home around 530. I skateboarding or play basketball with friends for about an hour, eat dinner around 7.
Ill then get down to writing code til around 10, then troll blogs/yc for 15 minutes, shower and end up hitting the sack around 10:30 - 10:45.
Then there is pillow talk with my gf, which probably the pinnacle of my 'social life'. Then Ive got the weekends to hang with friends and stuff.
Does that satisfy your curiousity?
Glad it works out for you.
No way, bad idea, eye strain.
My problem with going to bed at 4am-6am is that it's usually quite hard to get a good midnight snack. At least where I live and going into the kitchen is no option because I'd wake up my whole family. I usually end up eating a powerbar or cereal which probably isn't the best.
So I go overboard on exercise and it helps partially correct that.
The one thing I love about night-hacking is the serious lack of distractions. It assists me greatly in concentrating... at least in my neck of the woods there is less distractions.
DSPS makes maintaining a normal 24-hour schedule painful. (Imagine having to get up one hour earlier every day! That's how a 24-hour schedule feels to me.) I have it and it takes a lot of self-discipline to hold down the 9-to-5 schedule. But it is possible with the right techniques. More info on my experiences at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=205179 .
I do find that I'm much more productive when I'm awake during the night. It's probably because there aren't any interruptions and I couldn't run an errand if I wanted to.
I call it my "sleep clock", one day I'm awake from 10am->11pm, and a week later I'm awake 10pm->11am.
Not good though when you have things planned, you have to make sure your in the right timezone when you need to be.
(from the London Timezone)
But even though we start at 10am, I am in bed by latest at 11pm, wake up at 6:25am every day (yah even weekends), and do all my catching up (blogs, email, etc) twice a day, once in the morning with all my extra time, and once at night sometime after dinner. (Ok and a little bit during lunch hours at work)
Where I work you can watch the SVN commit messages in the dev channel coming by until about 5:00 AM several times a week. I'm on the dev team and do this myself about every other week.
This doesn't mean we're a bad company whipping every last bit of productivity out of people. It just means that sometimes you're on a roll, you're in the zone and you have to keep going. We get that. It's fine. Just don't show up at the office the next day.
Talented developers often are slightly anarchic, neurotic and just a wee bit obsessive. Even the most straight-laced "I only work 9-to-5" developers sometimes make a 4:00 AM commit because "I couldn't sleep and just figured out how we could re-use the token substitution in the webservices interface variables by mapping them to the corresponding domain entity attributes and applying the usual validation rules to them!"
Yeah, we're a model of sanity where I work :)
Generally speaking, as a developer you can start work between 8:00 and 12:00, but if you're just starting here the start time is 8:00 to 10:00 because you need supervision, education and time in pair-programming.
But then, I don't get up until 2pm, because my partner works the late shift (Because it's quieter!).
After starting this experiment about 2 weeks ago, I'm down to 6.5 hours now with no side effects. So far so good.
I'm no expert, so I'm really just regurgitating something I read awhile ago, so please bare in mind that it is probably not 100% correct, but the seed of the idea is there. I'm more or less going to describe what I've done based off what I've read.
The body only needs a couple of hours of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep to feel fully refreshed, anything over that and you're essentially wasting time.
I'm surviving pretty well on about 4-5 hours a night, it really depends but I find that if you exercise first thing in the morning as soon as you wake up, you do not miss that sleep.
I've actually purchased a recumbent exercise bike so that I can read blogs and forums in the morning while I exercise - this helps me compress my time so that I can get more done during the day.
The most important thing I've found is to ensure you have a consistent pattern for sleeping, otherwise my body will invariably want more sleep as it tries to get back into some sort of pattern.
To aid this, I've had my doctor prescribe me 10mg Temazepam which I think is a fantastic drug. I'm not on a high enough dosage to get hooked, but if need too, I take 1 tablet and it knocks me out fairly easily and unlike other drugs it is not one of those ones that will keep you asleep.
Hope this helps in some way.
What you say is correct, but about SWS ("Slow Wave Sleep", or stages 3 and 4 -- stage 1 being when REM occurs). These are the main recouperative stages.
Eliminating REM sleep (e.g. by waking someone up at the start of a REM cycle then letting them go back to sleep when the cycle would have ended) has little or no effect on alertness the next day, but doing the same for SWS cycles results in symptoms of sleep deprivation.
It has been hypothesized that REM sleep plays a role in strengthening memories, but evidence for this is spotty.
Regardless of how many hours you're asleep, reducing the amount of time spent asleep reduces the amount of REM sleep, but not NREM sleep, making you a "more efficient" sleeper.
The main evidence for long-term sleep reducton comes from studies by Friedman et al. (1977) and Mullaney et al. (1977). In these studies, which covered eight subjects over a period of several months, two reduced their sleep down to 5.5 hours, four down to 5 hours and the remaining two down to 4.5 hours. Below about 6 hours, the subjects reported daytime sleepiness, which increased as sleep was futher reduced. A follow-up study a year later showed that the subjects were sleeping 7-18 hours less per week. With only eight subjects, I'm a bit concerned about the generalizability of this study, but I think it's good enough for my purposes.
I read some material on this subject several years ago and have been putting it into practice ever since, so the specifics get lost in the day to day usage.