6 ms·

What really bugs me is the self-righteousness of the early riser. There's definitely some kind of power dynamic going on. Perhaps the joke should be: How do you

What really bugs me is the self-righteousness of the early riser. There's definitely some kind of power dynamic going on. Perhaps the joke should be: How do you know if someone gets up at 5am? Because they tell you.

amelius 8y ago
There's also an asymmetry: the person who works late can't rub it in, because the early person has already left the building.
- mcguire 8y ago
  "Why can't you be here at 8:00am?" "But I was the only person here at 7:00pm when the server fell over."
  - hinkley 8y ago
    Lately I’ve been toying with running my own company, and if I did (which I probably won’t)... Everything is 24/7 these days. It’s fucking ridiculous that we’re trying to have all of our employees in the office during exactly the same hours the same five days a week, and then outsource to a place 12 time zones away which can cover most of the rest of the day, except that you can’t even have a meeting without inconveniencing literally everybody. It’s stupid, wearing a clown suit backward. We should have heterogenous shifts. Say 9 days a fortnight with the 9th being a weekend. 25% of the staff is available on any weekend day, and everyone has one weekday off per week, and some fraction of the staff is available for extended hours the rest of the week. That might mean that Scrum and scrumbut don’t work but I’m perfectly fine with that.
- macNchz 8y ago
  As much as I dislike having to play the game, late-in-late-out people can benefit by saving some email replies until the tail end of their workday...it always feels gross to me to do it intentionally, but I've found it'll often placate the types of busybodies who conflate arrival time with productivity.
- hinkley 8y ago
  I had a coworker who ended up working an hour more on average than everybody else because he would show up at 6 and try to leave at 3. But shit usually breaks around 3 and that’s plenty of time for people to complain about how you’re never around when we need you. I tried to convince him to either work out or do a side project in the morning, or take at least an hour lunch every day. I wish I could remember what he ended up doing but it might have been “work somewhere else”.
gnicholas 8y ago
There are, of course, some early risers who don't do this. But yeah, the ones who do are pretty unbearable. I had a neighbor who boasted of how she woke up at 4:45a to work out. Of course, she fell asleep in front of the TV at 8p...
- whorleater 8y ago
  >I had a neighbor who boasted of how she woke up at 4:45a to work out. Of course, she fell asleep in front of the TV at 8p... Being sanctimonious is annoying, but that sounds like she's getting the right amount of sleep
  - gnicholas 8y ago
    And if she had bragged about getting the right amount of sleep, I wouldn't have cared. But she just went on and on about the superiority of early risers: how this successful VC or that successful CEO wakes up very early, and how in fact most successful people in SV wake up early.
- bena 8y ago
  It's not people who get up early and brag about it that are the problem. It's people who brag about useless stuff that are the problem. It's the same with people who go to bed really late as if it's some kind of achievement. Or people who sleep less. Or people who sleep more. All of these things are simply facts about your life. They don't make you any more virtuous, interesting, blah blah blah, than the next person.
danvasquez29 8y ago
as an early riser myself, what bothers me about this is that I personally feel like I'm only talking about because someone else is making a big deal out of it. I don't think I go out of my way to bring the topic up, but I'm constantly getting people saying things like "omg I saw when you sent that email/made that commit/whatever, do you ever sleep", and then I gotta say something like "well I was up at 5 so I knocked it out before I drove in..." and now it's a thing we're talking about and I'm the crazy guy. It feels like a much bigger issue to late-risers than early-risers.
- LifeQuestioner 8y ago
  I really wish I could sleep by 2am. It would make life possible. My natural sleep pattern is 5am-12. I've literally spent the last decade trying to solve it. Until, I gave up.
  - danvasquez29 8y ago
    it's been a conscious effort on my part and I'm still very susceptible to falling off the wagon for a week at a time. I don't think it's very natural for people tbh. I was always a late worker and still kind of am when the shit really hits the fan, but I am a believer that when I have to put in the extra hours, I'm usually more efficient in the morning that late at night. That motivates me to keep trying.
    - rootusrootus 8y ago
      For some people it is the most natural thing in the world.
  - anon1253 8y ago
    I'm the same, but I've found a life hack: work remotely for a company in the US while in the EU ... then it lines up better!
  - Retric 8y ago
    Move to a new time zone and that 'natural' 5am-12 would shift to match that time zone. So, it's really not about biology it's about how you set up your environment. That said, as long as it's working for you great! Just don't assume it's impossible to change if it's causing you problems.
modeless 8y ago
How do you know if someone gets up at 5 AM? They schedule all their meetings at 7 AM and think they're doing you a favor by imposing their schedule on you. See also: public school start times.
adrianmonk 8y ago
When it comes to work (or other morning activities), I think there are actually two aspects to this that often get confused. One is what you're talking about: the way people regard waking up early as virtuous. The other is that, how early or late you arrive to an event sends signals about your attitude toward the event. Or at least it is interpreted that way. For example, if you are very excited about seeing a particular movie or a concert and it has general admission, you will arrive early to get a good seat. Someone who is ambivalent about the movie will not make such an effort. Therefore, arrival time correlates with enthusiasm, and people know this, and they reason backwards. There's also probably some stuff behind why people don't want to be the first to arrive at a party. Arriving fashionably late can show you only want to experience the best part of the party, which in a sense is a power move indicating you think you are more important than some of the other guests. I think people sometimes have these perceptions in the business world too. If you have a later schedule, they're not sure if it's because you are aligning your work schedule with your productive hours or because you'd rather not be there. Ideally, people wouldn't make assumptions, but it happens.
- Retric 8y ago
  Showing up a little late to a party is more courteous as the hosts have just a little more time to set things up without needing to entertain people. Showing up early on the other hand often put's people who are not ready on the spot. If you regularly host parties who will get annoyed at people that show up 30+ minutes early unless they are willing to help.
  - thirdsun 8y ago
    To be fair these expectations vary wildly between cultures and countries. Where I come from the starting time of a party/event is regarded as actual starting time. You’re welcome, not expected, to arrive at that time and while there might be some minor preparations left, you’re in no way expected to help by being on time. However there was a reddit thread (or was it HN?) a few weeks back discussing this very issue and if i remember correctly being on time was considered almost rude in brazil as well as a number of other countries,
  - 8y ago
rootusrootus 8y ago
You sound like the guy at my office who gives me shit for leaving at 2:30PM. Maybe to him my exasperation sounds like self-righteousness. I never can tell why some people are so interested in my sleep schedule.
- hinkley 8y ago
  You are never gonna make leaving at 2:30 work, mate. There are too many mid afternoon fire drills and you walking out the door while people are trying to solve really bad problems is never going to fly. You are also going to be constantly having people trying to talk you into committing code after 2:00 (a perfectly reasonable time) but then getting pissed because you broke the build and went home. Have people started talking about Core Hours yet? They will.
  - rootusrootus 8y ago
    Very situational. I've been making 2:00-2:30PM work for 25 years. Maybe it's different in shops primarily filled with young people who show up late, work late, and have a philosophy of move-fast-and-break-things.
bitwize 8y ago
"Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise." The virtue of getting up early dates from the days when everybody was a farmer. Farmers who got a head start on the work that needed to be done even befode the sun came up outfarmed late risers. These days it is considered a mark of professionalism and respect for the job to show up for work on time or early, at 8 AM or before.
gmiller123456 8y ago
I think there's a lot of selection bias in your assertion that early risers are self righteous. There are people I have known for many years before finding out they were early risers. One of the biggest surprises was from a guy I had been working with for about 10 years who was notorious for coming in late, usually after lunch. I was on the local news at about 5am one day and he asked me about it. Of course my first response was "What the (&# were you doing up at 5am?", and he said "Oh, I'm always up that early, I just don't feel like going in to work until later."
kking50 8y ago
I've found that people who stay up late also tend to tell you [edit: and brag] about it. For example, if a friend is out late partying you're almost guaranteed to hear about how late they stayed out the next day. I think it goes both ways because people want to justify why they are not at 100% energy. Partly to not offend others when you're being abnormally unenthusiastic. A type of social defense mechanism.
tareqak 8y ago
How about everyone knowing what the word 'nocturnal' means, but they can't think of the word describing the opposite behaviour and resorting to using the word 'normal'. nocturnal - Done, occurring, or active at night. [0] diurnal - 1. Of or during the day. 2. Daily; of each day. [1] crepuscular - Resembling or relating to twilight. [2] [0] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/nocturnal https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/nocturnal [1] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/diurnal https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/diurnal [2] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/crepuscular https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/crepuscular
jm__87 8y ago
My natural wake time is 5:30 - 6:30 am and I am definitely a morning person. I can assure you that my being a morning person has more to do with me being too tired to stay awake beyond 10:30 pm than anything else.

amelius 8y ago

There's also an asymmetry: the person who works late can't rub it in, because the early person has already left the building.

mcguire 8y ago
"Why can't you be here at 8:00am?" "But I was the only person here at 7:00pm when the server fell over."
- hinkley 8y ago
  Lately I’ve been toying with running my own company, and if I did (which I probably won’t)... Everything is 24/7 these days. It’s fucking ridiculous that we’re trying to have all of our employees in the office during exactly the same hours the same five days a week, and then outsource to a place 12 time zones away which can cover most of the rest of the day, except that you can’t even have a meeting without inconveniencing literally everybody. It’s stupid, wearing a clown suit backward. We should have heterogenous shifts. Say 9 days a fortnight with the 9th being a weekend. 25% of the staff is available on any weekend day, and everyone has one weekday off per week, and some fraction of the staff is available for extended hours the rest of the week. That might mean that Scrum and scrumbut don’t work but I’m perfectly fine with that.
macNchz 8y ago
As much as I dislike having to play the game, late-in-late-out people can benefit by saving some email replies until the tail end of their workday...it always feels gross to me to do it intentionally, but I've found it'll often placate the types of busybodies who conflate arrival time with productivity.
hinkley 8y ago
I had a coworker who ended up working an hour more on average than everybody else because he would show up at 6 and try to leave at 3. But shit usually breaks around 3 and that’s plenty of time for people to complain about how you’re never around when we need you. I tried to convince him to either work out or do a side project in the morning, or take at least an hour lunch every day. I wish I could remember what he ended up doing but it might have been “work somewhere else”.

gnicholas 8y ago

There are, of course, some early risers who don't do this. But yeah, the ones who do are pretty unbearable. I had a neighbor who boasted of how she woke up at 4:45a to work out. Of course, she fell asleep in front of the TV at 8p...

whorleater 8y ago
>I had a neighbor who boasted of how she woke up at 4:45a to work out. Of course, she fell asleep in front of the TV at 8p... Being sanctimonious is annoying, but that sounds like she's getting the right amount of sleep
- gnicholas 8y ago
  And if she had bragged about getting the right amount of sleep, I wouldn't have cared. But she just went on and on about the superiority of early risers: how this successful VC or that successful CEO wakes up very early, and how in fact most successful people in SV wake up early.
bena 8y ago
It's not people who get up early and brag about it that are the problem. It's people who brag about useless stuff that are the problem. It's the same with people who go to bed really late as if it's some kind of achievement. Or people who sleep less. Or people who sleep more. All of these things are simply facts about your life. They don't make you any more virtuous, interesting, blah blah blah, than the next person.

danvasquez29 8y ago

as an early riser myself, what bothers me about this is that I personally feel like I'm only talking about because someone else is making a big deal out of it. I don't think I go out of my way to bring the topic up, but I'm constantly getting people saying things like "omg I saw when you sent that email/made that commit/whatever, do you ever sleep", and then I gotta say something like "well I was up at 5 so I knocked it out before I drove in..." and now it's a thing we're talking about and I'm the crazy guy. It feels like a much bigger issue to late-risers than early-risers.

LifeQuestioner 8y ago
I really wish I could sleep by 2am. It would make life possible. My natural sleep pattern is 5am-12. I've literally spent the last decade trying to solve it. Until, I gave up.
- danvasquez29 8y ago
  it's been a conscious effort on my part and I'm still very susceptible to falling off the wagon for a week at a time. I don't think it's very natural for people tbh. I was always a late worker and still kind of am when the shit really hits the fan, but I am a believer that when I have to put in the extra hours, I'm usually more efficient in the morning that late at night. That motivates me to keep trying.
  - rootusrootus 8y ago
    For some people it is the most natural thing in the world.
- anon1253 8y ago
  I'm the same, but I've found a life hack: work remotely for a company in the US while in the EU ... then it lines up better!
- Retric 8y ago
  Move to a new time zone and that 'natural' 5am-12 would shift to match that time zone. So, it's really not about biology it's about how you set up your environment. That said, as long as it's working for you great! Just don't assume it's impossible to change if it's causing you problems.

modeless 8y ago

How do you know if someone gets up at 5 AM? They schedule all their meetings at 7 AM and think they're doing you a favor by imposing their schedule on you. See also: public school start times.

adrianmonk 8y ago

When it comes to work (or other morning activities), I think there are actually two aspects to this that often get confused. One is what you're talking about: the way people regard waking up early as virtuous. The other is that, how early or late you arrive to an event sends signals about your attitude toward the event. Or at least it is interpreted that way. For example, if you are very excited about seeing a particular movie or a concert and it has general admission, you will arrive early to get a good seat. Someone who is ambivalent about the movie will not make such an effort. Therefore, arrival time correlates with enthusiasm, and people know this, and they reason backwards. There's also probably some stuff behind why people don't want to be the first to arrive at a party. Arriving fashionably late can show you only want to experience the best part of the party, which in a sense is a power move indicating you think you are more important than some of the other guests. I think people sometimes have these perceptions in the business world too. If you have a later schedule, they're not sure if it's because you are aligning your work schedule with your productive hours or because you'd rather not be there. Ideally, people wouldn't make assumptions, but it happens.

Retric 8y ago
Showing up a little late to a party is more courteous as the hosts have just a little more time to set things up without needing to entertain people. Showing up early on the other hand often put's people who are not ready on the spot. If you regularly host parties who will get annoyed at people that show up 30+ minutes early unless they are willing to help.
- thirdsun 8y ago
  To be fair these expectations vary wildly between cultures and countries. Where I come from the starting time of a party/event is regarded as actual starting time. You’re welcome, not expected, to arrive at that time and while there might be some minor preparations left, you’re in no way expected to help by being on time. However there was a reddit thread (or was it HN?) a few weeks back discussing this very issue and if i remember correctly being on time was considered almost rude in brazil as well as a number of other countries,
- 8y ago

rootusrootus 8y ago

You sound like the guy at my office who gives me shit for leaving at 2:30PM. Maybe to him my exasperation sounds like self-righteousness. I never can tell why some people are so interested in my sleep schedule.

hinkley 8y ago
You are never gonna make leaving at 2:30 work, mate. There are too many mid afternoon fire drills and you walking out the door while people are trying to solve really bad problems is never going to fly. You are also going to be constantly having people trying to talk you into committing code after 2:00 (a perfectly reasonable time) but then getting pissed because you broke the build and went home. Have people started talking about Core Hours yet? They will.
- rootusrootus 8y ago
  Very situational. I've been making 2:00-2:30PM work for 25 years. Maybe it's different in shops primarily filled with young people who show up late, work late, and have a philosophy of move-fast-and-break-things.

bitwize 8y ago

"Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise." The virtue of getting up early dates from the days when everybody was a farmer. Farmers who got a head start on the work that needed to be done even befode the sun came up outfarmed late risers. These days it is considered a mark of professionalism and respect for the job to show up for work on time or early, at 8 AM or before.

gmiller123456 8y ago

I think there's a lot of selection bias in your assertion that early risers are self righteous. There are people I have known for many years before finding out they were early risers. One of the biggest surprises was from a guy I had been working with for about 10 years who was notorious for coming in late, usually after lunch. I was on the local news at about 5am one day and he asked me about it. Of course my first response was "What the (&# were you doing up at 5am?", and he said "Oh, I'm always up that early, I just don't feel like going in to work until later."

kking50 8y ago

I've found that people who stay up late also tend to tell you [edit: and brag] about it. For example, if a friend is out late partying you're almost guaranteed to hear about how late they stayed out the next day. I think it goes both ways because people want to justify why they are not at 100% energy. Partly to not offend others when you're being abnormally unenthusiastic. A type of social defense mechanism.

tareqak 8y ago

How about everyone knowing what the word 'nocturnal' means, but they can't think of the word describing the opposite behaviour and resorting to using the word 'normal'. nocturnal - Done, occurring, or active at night. [0] diurnal - 1. Of or during the day. 2. Daily; of each day. [1] crepuscular - Resembling or relating to twilight. [2] [0] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/nocturnal https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/nocturnal [1] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/diurnal https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/diurnal [2] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/crepuscular https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/crepuscular

jm__87 8y ago

My natural wake time is 5:30 - 6:30 am and I am definitely a morning person. I can assure you that my being a morning person has more to do with me being too tired to stay awake beyond 10:30 pm than anything else.