Comment by ramirez60 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ramirez60 | Hacker News Reader

I can't be alone in being exhausted at these studies. Doctors and Lawyers have spent the better part of the last century working on little to no sleep. Academics too. As an engineer, I would regularly work through little sleep because the process of loading a large project into my head to work on it would take more time than the gains from being more well rested. I'm older now, and no longer work as an engineer. I value my sleep and appreciate how much more I can task-switch on a good nights rest, but the idea that I'm not being productive when I'm grinding through work that has to get done and I'm tired seems an overwritten idea.

I'm not arguing against rest and recharging and clearing your mind. I just don't see what these articles are trying to prove. When I was in college I had several stints of no sleep days to finish projects. Even into my early engineering career, I once billed 40 hours straight. Was I as "productive" per minute for that entire time as if I had slept through 5 nights? No. Would the work have gotten done faster than those 40 hours if I had slept for 8 hours in the middle a few times? No. I had a deadline, and there was nothing getting around the work needing to be done.

The argument seems to be against a constant sprinting mode, which I don't think any company employs. Humans burn out after continuous work for weeks, sometimes months. But a week or 3 of little to no sleep to get through everything you need to? It's worked for a long time. Arguably building up muscle memory while forcing rote things to be learned while on little sleep works. What are we trying to prove by this? That "the man" is out to abuse workers? Of course he is. But did anyone make partner at a law firm by claiming he's going to more productive by working less? If you're goal is work life balance, go ahead. But if you're goal is to excel in a field, then it probably involves some sleep deprivation. PG wrote an article about the reason startups were suited for youth is that you could push through unreasonable hours to crank a lot of life into fewer days.

Sorry for the rant...just wondering if I'm alone in thinking this

Your definition of "works" is suspicious to me.

If you're saying that in the short term, short-term thinking works, sure. If you're in college and are doing a bunch of work that doesn't matter to deadlines that are entirely made up, sure, you can get away with it.

You claim that doctors do fine without enough sleep, but even doctors don't claim that any more. Doctor friends tell me it's a big focus for reform. [1] And in areas where safety is even more important, like piloting planes, they take mandatory rest even more seriously.

Software is mostly not life-critical, but I think it's uniquely bad in this regard. Doctors can bury their mistakes, but version control systems preserve ours forever. It's too easy to be negatively productive in software, and enormously easier if you're not getting enough sleep.

[1] http://www.bcmj.org/article/sleep-deprivation-among-physicia...

I don't mean to claim doctors do fine without enough sleep. Doctor friends I have spoken to talk about this talk about the reforms but it is not uniformly positive. I am trying to posit that the claim that we function better with more sleep is true. But that claim is made in a vacuum. Person A operates at 100% well rested. But operating at 80% or 60% is more valuable than 0% if averaged out over time. So I can write better code when I'm well rested, sure. I agree with that. I think everyone logically will. If I have 1000 lines of code to write. And it will take me 10 hours to write it. And I have 2 days to do it. I'll spread it out over 2 days and write good code, and maybe it only end up taking 800 lines of code. But if I have 1 day to write it. I might end up writing 1200 lines of code, but still get it done in that day, it is more valuable to me, than a day later when the code doesn't matter anymore. I'd argue I'd rather a doctor save my life that day, than do a great job and make sure I never scar over two days when the option isn't there.

Medicine is a regulated industry in that the number of people trained almost precisely matches the number of jobs available. The training process is designed to prune out people who cannot function when they have to choose between life saving procedure, and doing the life saving procedure perfectly but losing the patient. It's a straw-man I know, I'm just tired of everyone being absolutely fascinated by this idea that resting is better than not resting. Isn't that just obvious? Does anyone feel like they work better when they are tired? What knowledge are we gaining by these discussions?

> I'd argue I'd rather a doctor save my life that day, than do a great job and make sure I never scar over two days when the option isn't there.

> What knowledge are we gaining by these discussions?

Sure, if that was all there was to it, then you'd be 100% right. The knowledge we seem to be gaining from these discussions is that a programmer who works 6 hours a day is overall more productive than one who works 8 hours a day, let alone one who has been on a 16 hour death march for 6 months. The same idea applied to the doctor example may mean that your doctor is less likely to save your life if they're on the 28th hour of their shift than one that wasn't.

Yes, there's a time and a place for burning a candle at both ends, but we seem to think that this is OK to do in the long term. So sure, if you need to pull a rare 20-hour marathon to fix an urgent problem, do it - the value might well justify the cost. But don't tell yourself that it's sustainable or even optimal in the long term, evidence seems to suggest the exact opposite.

If you are throwing away your tired-brain code a week later, godspeed. Do what you like. But if you are checking in that code and making other people deal with it, then quality becomes much more important. If you write 1200 lines of code instead of 800, then you have something that has 50% more maintenance cost and 50% more bugs. (And it's probably worse given that you were tired and thinking with a short-term mindset.) So hell yes, it matters to me whether my coworkers are putting long-term value above short-term incentives.

> I'm just tired of everyone being absolutely fascinated by this idea that resting is better than not resting. Isn't that just obvious?

It is not in fact obvious. So many places reward time spent more than quality work. Just today at a meetup we were talking about how to shift people away from damaging and expensive heroics to investing in not creating such big problems that you need work-all-night heroes. The industry is notorious for death marches and work-all-the-time startups. And it's also notorious for buggy, low-productivity, high-tech-debt code bases and giant rewrites caused by years of accumulated short-term thinking.

If it's obvious to you, skip over the articles. Not everything has to be for you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com