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Comment by senorprogrammer | Hacker News Reader

Once upon a time I did the start-up, sleep-deprived, living at work thing, and frankly younger me thought it was awesome. Older me looks back and things younger me was sometimes an idiot.

Recently I had a kid and got to experience the sleep-deprivation effects all over again except this time with one big difference: I work with an awesome team who were able to pick up the slack, and I was smart enough to know when to ask for help (once literally saying "I'm too stupid to do this now, can you do it?")

Sleep-deprivation is going to continue to be endemic in our industry (not just amongst start-ups, the twenty-somethings today are going to be having kids soon themselves). Instead of fighting through the slack, find ways to mitigate it; build your teams with people you can rely on to cover you when you're short.

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I realized this super early on in high school. I don't even bother doing anything remotely brain intensive if I haven't gotten 8 hours of sleep. I just can't, I know how great a good sleep feels and anything else sucks in comparison, so I cast it away as a lost day as my "punishment" for not sleeping.

I switch to doing anything mind-numbingly boring where mistakes will not cause critical problems when I'm sleep deprived.

E.g. at home, if I notice I'm too tired to focus on something challenging, I'll do the dishes, or clean the kitchen, or tidy up.

At work, I might tidy the server room, or go through my cron-job folder and investigate all the errors/warnings I've filed away as "annoying but harmless; needs fixing some day" that usually involve fixes that are low risk and easy to verify. Anything that are risky (e.g. requiring changes to a production database server...) I'll defer if possible.

I find a lot of the boring/reptitive tasks are easier to do when I'm tired, as when I'm tired I fall into repetitive routines easily, so as long as I push myself to get started on something repetitive, I'll just keep doing it without getting easily distracted.

Oh yeah man I'm totally with you on that. My unproductive side takes over on those days: "Hmm could work on that project... na feeling a bit sleepy, how about some video games... just a bit..."

;)

I'm the opposite. When I'm sleep deprived menial tasks don't seem as boring as they do normally, since I need my full attention to do them with the limited brain capacity.

My prior scrum team's PM had 4 hour sprint planning meetings. Every two weeks.

Sounds agile, right? Pure torture.

I'd skip sleep and coffee before the meeting(s), just to survive them.

Throw in spending three 8+ hour days working on an inception deck. Then do a 2 hour sprint planning meeting, spend 1.5 days working, then a 2 hour sprint review meeting.

Then throw in a pivot every 2 or 3 weeks, involving a new inception deck.

Why were they that long? There could be many valid reasons to have a sprint planning that takes 4 hours. If 4 hours every 2 weeks is the only planning type meeting you have that is pretty good.

So much of "Agile"/Scrum, at least in practice, is passive-aggressive, collective punishment. The team is judged to be underperforming, thus subjected to painful, useless meetings and degrading process that might turn zeros into just-barely-employable 0.5x programmers but bring the 10x down to zombie levels.

If you're feeling a bit sleepy, take a nap.

    > Once upon a time I did the start-up, sleep-deprived,
    > living at work thing, and frankly younger me thought
    > it was awesome.

Same here. My team recently all stepped back and decided to improve our work-life balance because in the past it had gotten seriously out of whack. Working 16 hour days just doesn't seem sustainable, and I say this as a 20-year-old with a fair amount of energy.

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