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Comment by skwirl | Hacker News Reader

Carmack is very much atypical, but I don’t think getting completely wiped after 7 hours of any focused work is normal, either. It’s certainly the case if you are doing 7 hours of something you hate or find tedious. I would probably be fried doing 7 hours of nothing but code reviews. But if I’m building something I feel excited about, I can work as many hours as my life obligations will allow and feel pretty good about it. Lots of people have no trouble playing 12 straight hours of civilization or other focused video games.

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7 straight hours of anything will fry me. But most people in the technology field (hell, any field) don't work for 7 straight hours. They work for a couple hours at a time and take breaks in between. I'd be surprised if most office workers do more than 4 hours of actual work a day

Bingo

It depends on whether or not you count pretending to be busy as work.

People are very different. My gf cannot sit down and work for more than an hour before she needs to go for a walk and take breaks. In general, she doesn’t find office/computer work fulfilling and is looking for a more dynamic career.

I on the other hand can go 12 hours getting up once or twice to go to WC and will skip lunch. Taking a break most of the time sounds like a punishment. When I’m working on a problem and hold a lot of information in my working memory taking a break would only set me way back. Meetings are avoided unless absolutely necessary. Emails and messages are answered before I shut down as they don’t require much focus. That’s how I love working. But I’m also very introverted and robotic. I need to find a more balanced approach and appreciate my gf’s influence on me but it doesn’t come naturally to me.

I’ve worked for a decade in academic labs where 90 hour weeks were normal and you get two weeks off in a year. Not just grunt work but reading writing analyzing complex experiments etc.

I then came to tech and started coding. It was a breath of relief. I didn’t know what you’re supposed to do on saturdays!

But when you get in the zone and start writing a large amount of non-crud code, seven hours is kinda the max. You’re totally wiped out. Coding a complex application is quite unlike anything except writing a complex novel or technical document. No one, I mean NO ONE who writes well writes for 11 hours a day lol. The most prolific writers average an hour.

I get tunnel vision when I've been coding for several hours. I'll be stuck on a problem and I'll keep switching back to the same two areas of focus that I've already exhausted. I'll get frustrated because the problem seems totally inexplicable. The other day I was stuck on such a problem at 8pm. My sister in law suggested I just go to sleep, and look at the problem with fresh eyes tomorrow. Doing what she said, I solved the (stupidly simple) problem within 5 minutes of turning my laptop on the next day.

There are SO MANY environmental and physiological factors which go into your state of mind. Some variables that I try to control for:

1. What (if anything) did you eat today

2. How much water did you drink

3. Did you shower today

4. How much sleep did you get, or how long have you been awake (probably the most important one right here)

5. What is the warmth of the light where you are working (is it cloudy and rainy outside?)

6. What is the temperature of the room

7. Is anything else going on in your life occupying your mind right now? If you take medication: did you take your medications?

8. Did you exercise today? Do you exercise at all? Are you healthy?

9. How is your posture?

10. Is your work environment clean? Is it noisy?

11. Do you work better with music on, or in silence?

12. Did you drink so much caffeine that you are now manic and can't focus?

13. Are you happy?

The brain is a part of the body

>reading writing

I think it depends precisely what you are doing. There is a difference between low cognitive effort (e.g. reading) and high effort (e.g. creating an algorithm or playing chess). Low effort uses glucose, whereas high-effort requires the microglia (the brain's immune cells) to create lactate and transport it to the neurons. Excess microglia activation has been linked to anxiety, depression and neuroinflammation.

I suspect it's not physically possible for a chess grandmaster to play for 90 hours a week, but probably quite easy for the average person to read or write for 90 hours a week (with some breaks).

>start writing a large amount of non-crud code, seven hours is kinda the max.

Most programming jobs are just writing "crud code" if you want to call it that...basically mostly meetings, and cranking out banal code. You can certainly do this for 90 hours a week without fatigue, although it will likely lead to burnout in the long-term, so it's probably better to find a job that does require significant mental effort, but without requiring 90 hour weeks.

Academic reading is not light reading if you’re doing it right though. It’s much harder than programming for me.

Well, again it depends. I was just reading a few reviews on microglia before replying to your comment, in order to update my knowledge, and I would describe it as very light effort...I'd guess I didn't enter into the lactate territory. It's nothing like coming up with an algorithm or trying to solve a problem.

The only time I've found it has come close is when actually writing a hypothesis or review paper: having to read through the literature in order to come up with a coherent theory while juggling the concepts in my head. It's very similar to solving a programming problem, and does involve significant mental effort.

But it probably also depends on the speed that it's done at. For complex algorithms or prototypes I prefer to just power through and get the whole thing done to the prototype stage in half a day (or whatever it takes, depending on the complexity), then spend the next month (or whatever) fleshing it out. There are probably other ways of doing it that don't require such cognitive effort at the beginning, but I find that for complex problems that's sometimes the best way of solving them, at least in my experience, and it only involves significant mental effort for a very short period of time.

> Most programming jobs are just writing "crud code" if you want to call it that...basically mostly meetings, and cranking out banal code.

I would say that in such instances, often times the code is banal, but proper modeling of the reality, even in cases where final result looks like a classical crud, is where complexity hides.

I say "hides", because, from my experience, only those directly involved in the implementation are actually mentally exposed to it. If they care about the quality of the output, that is.

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