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“Our results also show that sleep-deprived developers make more fixes to syntactic mistakes in the source code.”

That statement, in isolation, could be taken completely out of context.

Of course no sane person would conclude that a sleep deprived developer can fix more bugs. However there are many executive-level staff that are definitely not sane.

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Yeah curious why more people didn't notice that strange phrasing. Not sure what the point of it was. Did they make more mistakes and therefore fix more of them?

My guess here is that fixing those syntactic "mistakes" really means changing the code so it does the same thing, refactoring if you will.

I catch myself doing this sometimes when I'm tired or disengaged - spending my time on pointless refactoring or gold-plating. Presumably because these things are easier than what I should be tackling, but trick me into feeling productive.

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