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Comment by anoplus | Hacker News Reader

Programmer in a start-up here. Please do talk about this with your workaholic colleagues as I did! We need to create an industry standard here.

Sleep is super important to success and happiness, and I just recently found that sleep is not enough. I need also rest. If I don't have rest and relaxation often I get tired for several days regardless of sleep time. Writing this after deliberate 5 minutes downtime.

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I've been a pro programmer since age 15ish, now 34. I've been rebooting my health for the past 6 years where I found myself 50lbs overweight and isolated and alcoholic. Sleep and breaks have been an invisible health issue until about 3 years ago. Laying down boundaries about personal time was received very badly indeed. This was following 2 years of week-on/week-off on PagerDuty, with noisy frequent false alarms that were never a priority to fix(!). Since August I've been 100% out of tech but still in Silicon Valley, doing landscaping and moving and waiting, and in these industries I've for the first time had managers who've encouraged sleep, reminded me to drink water, and made breaks mandatory and it's amazing. When I hire programmers I'm going to treat them like landscapers.

I used to joke about solving problems from yesterday while taking a shower or crossing the street to the office but this is deadly serious.

I’m solving problems not just because I’m doing a mundane task and have time to ruminate. It’s also because I just slept and am fully rested.

If a mechanic treated his tools like we treat our bodies his coworkers would look down on him for sloppiness. Take care of your “tools”.

This may just be me, but when I was in charge of hiring a team, I ended up passing on sleep-foregoing candidates (often that wasn't the only thing, but it was a big factor for me).

To this day, candidates that don't take care of getting enough sleep just to get things done, raise a red flag for me.

Curious... did you really ask candidates about their sleep patterns?

Why don't you think your colleagues value sleep? Is it that there's no data, save qualitative, backing up your claims?

I think there is enough supportive data today, and that sleep deprivation still exists from cultural reasons. In my case it has improved as new folks joined the group and brought cultural change. Even if one knows the data alone, one might give in external pressure. I think its true for other things like smoking, alcohol etc.

> Writing this after deliberate 5 minutes downtime.

Pomodoro is another of those life-work habit enhancements which (counterintuitively) increases productivity and happiness.

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