Hacker News Reader

The natural programmer's schedule is around 30 hours so it constantly slips relative to the day cycle.

Nothing has ever rung truer for me than this comment. I've battled against this almost my entire life. Now that I'm working from home I still keep a basic schedule that involves waking up in the morning and not totally drifting. But having the slack to drift around a little has massively improved my quality of life.

I had no idea this was common for programmers. Is there any evidence to back up your claim, other than our two points of anecdata?

I worked with a guy who lived on a 28-hour schedule; 6 days to the week. He swore this suited his natural body clock.

It was quite difficult to figure out when you’d see him in work next.

Another programmer data point: I live in the US, and rarely start after 8am.

I worked in Germany and now Austria and in both countries most locals would already be at the office and coding at 7:30 while I would still be in bed.

It might have something to do with short schedules of Austrian businesses which meant that if you go with 9:00-5:30 work schedule by the time you finished work the shops would be almost closed so you learn to optimize for early in the office, early out the office.