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Comment by jefftk | Hacker News Reader

For what it's worth, that hasn't been my experience. I've been working ~9-5:30 as a programmer for my whole career (2008-present) with essentially no late night coding. I think that's been very typical at the places I've worked (defense contractor, mature startup, Google, startup, Google).

I do think the fraction of managers with kids is higher, but I suspect this is just explained by managers generally being older?

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Perhaps just different personality types. I have never worked well technically productive in an office. I view that as planning, reviewing, conversational time. I just love working on things at night. My brain feels optimized at that time. But kids stopped allowing me that window, which wasn't necessarily 9pm-2am or something. More like 3pm-midnight.

I’m the same way. It’s like I am more awake after 3pm and ready to finally start working. I do drink caffeine, which helps

For me it's some combination of the darkness and less "other stuff happening". Otherwise I just want to go outside and otherwise get distracted by the hustle and bustle of humanity.

Yup, me too. I can count the number of times I had to work late on two hands. I live in Europe, though.

I almost never have to work late. But historically I've found myself doing it anyway, either due to poor personal time management, or being really excited about solving a problem, or just because I didn't feel like my brain was working properly during the morning. I've worked pretty hard to adjust my schedule to something I consider more stable and sustainable, but I know I'm not alone in functioning this way.

I'm sure having kids is a powerful incentive to adjust more rapidly and more completely.

Yes I agree. I think it is just a statistical coincidence

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