Software Engineers, Get Some Sleep | Hacker News Reader

Software Engineers, Get Some Sleep

iricvalley.com

19 pointsSherwette14 comments

I used to drink 5-6 cups of coffee every day for a year. Around christmas I took a 4 week vacation, and I cut down coffee usage to half of a cup a day and got at least 8 hours of sleep every night. It has transformed me into a different worker now that I am back at the office and it is so nice, I try to re-arrange everything around me in my life to make that feeling stay. I get things done a lot faster, my overall productivity has definetly risen.

I can only encourage people to try the same. Coffee is cheating. You cheat your body and yourself that is telling you "I am too tired for this, stop right now". Drink 1-2 cups at maximum per day and make sure you get at least 8-9 hours of sleep.

The official advice (in the UK at least) is that up to four or five cups of coffee a day is fine. This was according to leaflets in my doctor's waiting room produced by the coffee growers association or some group like that. I showed my doctor one of the leaflets and he went to the waiting room and removed them all.

He advised me to ditch coffee, which resolved what was otherwise going to be a diagnosis of chronic fatigue syndrome (which is a diagnosis of exclusion of a disease that not everybody agrees even exists). If you're feeling tired, try giving up any drugs that affect how awake you are.

(And go to a doctor. Plenty of engineers don't eat right as well as not sleeping right, anaemia feels absolutely terrible but is so easy to diagnose and treat)

From personal experience, if I didn't get enough sleep or haven't eaten well, the productivity of my work just go down the drain. I get cranky and I can't focus, but I have seen a lot of engineers who can work for days sleeping just few hours a day on just crackers. They don't mind not eating or sleeping well as long as they meet the deadline.

I used to be like the engineers you saw. I burnt out pretty hard, now I'm like you, I need my sleep! (Well, I obviously needed it before, I just wasn't feeling it)

Software Engineers, reduce or eliminate that caffeine intake.

After college I lost the ability to code for long nights. I usually don't bother getting out until I got 8-9 hours of sleep, otherwise I'll be useless.

Telling insomniacs to "Get some sleep" is a really helpful advice. Thanks.

If you end up staring at a computer screen late into the night like I do, the light may be disrupting your circadian rhythms. Theres a utility called Flux (http://www.stereopsis.com/flux/) which adjusts the brightness and color of your screen depending on the time of day to make it less disruptive. I've found it to be helpful in getting me feeling sleepy earlier.

a sample size of 91 people is insanely small.

It also appears from the abstract [1] that the participants were all from a single company.

[1] http://www.springerlink.com/content/h2287x387r248223/

Really? I've seen clinical trials published with far smaller samples. I am not a statistician, but is there a layman's metric to determining appropriate sample size?

And with that...

More important than getting the sleep is whether or not you are descending into the proper sleep stages and getting down into REM sleep.

http://www.popsci.com/gear-amp-gadgets/article/2009-06/rough...

Yeah, the stages are more important though, rather than just REM sleep. People who are sleep deprived (or depressed) will frequently descend almost immediately into REM sleep, even during a nap.

I'm not exactly sleep deprived but have a messed up circadian rhythm that messes with my hours and I frequently have intense dreams within the first 30 minutes of sleep. Fun for me but not a great sign ;-)

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