8 ms·
Sleep quality and stress level matter more than languages or practices
- 2sk21 7y agoDefinitely strikes a chard in me - I've completely stopped coding when I'm tired as it has often led to disasters. I've just learned to live this limitation but its not been too hard.
- andai 7y agoI read here recently, "For a time, I worked 12 hour days. I'd spend the first 4 hours of the day fixing mistakes I made in the last 4 hours the previous evening."
- hackerbabz 7y agoI’ve been wondering about this WRT the 969 policy at companies in China. Why did they not immediately see a drop in productivity when implemented? Is China’s software industry making itself less competitive by not letting its workers sleep enough?
- sametmax 7y agoBecause they don't care about the afterfall. They have an expendable work force and bribes to work around penalties.
- snaky 7y agoThere's no drop in productivity if you don't care about quality.
- threatofrain 7y agoMaybe some people have the time to do creative and patient work, while other engineers crank out GUIs and iterative corrections. Presumably Andrew Ng isn’t being asked to demonstrate his loyalty or commitment. Isn’t it the same in all professions?
- someperson 7y agoThe sibling replies neglect to mention that midday naps are very common in China (across all age groups), with lunchtimes typically being 2 hours long. It's really not that different to Google having nap pods.
- aswanson 7y agoGoogle has nap pods? Wow...that remindsof mats they used to have for us in preschool. Sheesh.
- kthejoker2 7y agoCan't tell if you're being pejorative or not, but I make it a point (as a regional director) to take naps when I'm tired in full view of anyone who wants to see. Yo don't always have the luxury of waiting till you're in a nice cool bed with the environment and time of your choosing. People need sleep when they need it. Pretending otherwise is foolish.
- OnlyRepliesToBS 7y agonice deflection
- aoeusnth1 7y agoStigmatizing naps is so boneheaded, petty and backwards that I'm surprised to see anyone on this site so casually write something like this. Literally read anything on the subject, please? https://www.sleepfoundation.org/articles/napping https://www.sleepfoundation.org/articles/napping
- aswanson 7y agoRead deeper into the post, Im not stigmatizing naps. Im big on sleep. Love it so much & think it's fundamental to physical and mental health. Its so important that if you need it at a place of employment, maybe that place of employment needs to do a better job of load-balancing.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- glass_of_water 7y agoI think part of the problem is that it's so difficult to actually measure productivity in software development.
- thatfrenchguy 7y agoMeasuring productivity is impossible because you can’t do repeated experiments
- winter_blue 7y agoI've never heard of this 969 policy. What is it?
- ajnin 7y agoIt's rather 996 : work from 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week.
- avichalp 7y agoYes, this comes up often. I think it is difficult to be disciplined about it. To catch yourself when you are not well rested and act accordingly.
- mettamage 7y agoDuh. Then again, this is not repeated enough! Moreover, I have the idea that companies don’t know, they should.
- dieSlowly 7y agoAnd this is why I fucking quit my last job. Rot in hell you fucking pieces of shit.
- nreilly 7y agoThe book ‘Why we Sleep’ has a lot of the detail on how sleep (or the lack of) impacts you.
- faitswulff 7y agoSurprisingly, the Joe Rogan interview covers most of the book and is pretty funny: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwaWilO_Pig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwaWilO_Pig If you have a long commute, I can recommend it.
- kuroguro 7y agoGreat episode! The part about memory centers sort of reminds me of GANs. Discriminate during day, generate during night.
- Jach 7y agoThe big picture is trivially true -- if you don't sleep, you die. Where's your favorite language, now? Similarly if you don't eat -- yet few people would make a rant about "food quality matters more than languages". There's still a lot of nuance. What studies there are don't negate the existence of variability either. Well, then what's the point of bringing up the subject? Taken broadly sleep is important as life itself, but then it has no place in an earnest discussion around improving productivity. Taken narrowly, it's very context sensitive, so it's again rather useless in discussing improving your own or even your team's productivity unless you're already in the weeds of knowing individuals' detailed backgrounds. There's a fun fact johnc's comment in that thread points out. We can all agree if we want that if people aren't getting their 8 hours (or some number close by), that has to happen first, and we can ignore whatever nuance/variability/context objections one might have. But with 8 hours, there are still over 100 other hours in the week. 80 if we're just talking M-F. What are you going to do to fill those more productively? If switching languages lets you do something in half the time as otherwise, why wouldn't you switch, and rather than just taking half the day off, continue working and do twice as much as you would in the other language for the day? Is the point that you shouldn't unnecessarily waste your waking life for some company? Fine, but you shouldn't do that even if you're getting 10 hours every night and are only asked to work 30 hours a week if those 30 hours are truly a waste. On the other hand, you might be in a situation where 80+ hours this week (hopefully not forced to be compressed to M-F or intrude on your sleep requirements) spent on work is the most non-wasteful thing you can think to be doing with your life at this time. Circumstances are different.
- kthejoker2 7y agoI would think, in absence of other evidence, that investing in microoptimizing sleep and stress would have more benefits than any language or tool choice. So it's not just 8 hours, it's also midday naps, circadian rhythms, it's letting people sleep when they need to. And you didn't even mention stress and there are of course myriad ways to improve mood levels and reduce stress. And obviously some of that stress will come from your choice of tools and methods, but again, we have little evidence as to which tools and methods produce the least amount of stress. It's not what you do, or even how you do it, it's the circumstances in which you do it that have the greatest impact on your ability to do it well. Work 80 hours, work 5, play 50, dig ditches, cure cancer - doesn't matter, fix sleep and stress before worrying about the little things.
- mikekchar 7y agoI think this is true for the most part, although poor development practices can eventually catch up to you (I once worked in a place with 5000 programmers working on the same thing and whose productivity averaged 1 line of code per day -- it can happen.. :-P ). However, while many people will rightly complain about stress in the workplace and long hours coding, I'd like to also point out that stress and lack of sleep can come in a variety of packages. I've seen good programmers destroy their careers because they thought there was no problem staying up drinking all night on workdays. I've experienced (unfortunately) being in a bad relationship and arguing with my SO all night until it was time to go to work. Stress and sleepless nights will cost you in your career. It might cost you a lot. It's not sexy to be the person that avoids drama in their life and manages their sleep schedule well, but it can have pretty significant rewards. If you think that in SV the difference between a top and middling performer can easily be in the $100K per year area, it puts a pretty hefty price tag on "Oh, I'm pretty sure I can catch up on my sleep on the weekend". From the "hard to talk about, but I wish I knew this 20-30 years ago" department :-(
- pier25 7y ago> being in a bad relationship and arguing with my SO all night until it was time to go to work If that ever happened to me I'd seriously consider my life choices in the romantic department.
- cududa 7y ago...you’ve never had an all night argument with your partner?
- pier25 7y agoNo, never. I've been with my current SO for over 10 years (and married) and had a couple long term relationships before that. We've had arguments like any other couple, but never an all night argument.
- mikekchar 7y agoThat's pretty much my point ;-) At the time you think, "I have to make this work". You feel like you are failing big time and you have to try harder. You don't necessarily realise the cost of that effort. It's weird to say, "Is this really my priority?" Relationships don't always work out and that's fine. Don't let a bad relationship bulldoze the rest of your life too is what I'm trying to get at. It's great that it's never happened to you -- some people are either lucky or skilled in this area :-) Until I met the person who is my wife now, I was neither ;-)
- ryanmarsh 7y agoThis is why I recommend every developer read Deep Work by Cal Newport and Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. Deep Work in particular made a bigger impact on my programming than any thing else in ~25 years, including languages frameworks and tools. What I’m saying is, good sleep and the principles from Deep Work made more of an impact on my productivity than switching from Java Spring, to Ruby on Rails, or to functional JS and Serverless. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
- CrestonePeak 7y agoJust bought Deep Work because you mentioned it; Newport's So Good They Can't Ignore You was refreshing.
- propogandist 7y agoWhat's with this trend of multi-tweet posts being seen as noteworthy articles on HN?
- joshmanders 7y agoProbably because the quality of the content mattered more than the platform it was posted it.
- Shorel 7y agoIf you are going to write that much, please use a better platform than Twitter.
- myth_buster 7y ago> Twitter is my stream of consciousness thoughts, blog (http://hillelwayne.com http://hillelwayne.com ) is my heavily edited and revised thoughts https://twitter.com/hillelogram/status/1119765732127072256 https://twitter.com/hillelogram/status/1119765732127072256
- wrs 7y agoThat explanation actually kind of makes it worse.
- tabs_masterrace 7y agoI'd say Twitter is the perfect platform for non sense like this. Where else can you come up with great wisdom like: Hey sleeping is more important then TDD, and have thousands of people join in on your little rant, like you just discovered the great solution to all problems in software development.
- scarejunba 7y agoYeah, man, but I'm doing well. I'm awake at 0730 San Francisco time after sleeping more than 8 hrs before, I eat a balanced breakfast, time my lunch and dinner appropriately, deadlift a respectable-though-not-special 350 lbs, run a 6 min mile, make about half a mil a year, have friends I love dearly and who love me, and everyone I know closely has a good life. Some dumbass downing Red Bull to type `console.log("got here")` for the fiftieth time in the last 36 hrs without sleep isn't on my level. All these things aren't things for Mr. Red Bull. They're for me trying to close the gap in productivity to Carmack. Or rather that's all true for my friends. I can only deadlift 345.
- jaequery 7y agoI had chronic insomnia for several years. But then I’ve stopped coding right before sleeping at least 1-3 hours in advance and now I can finally sleep. Who would’ve thought.
- BareNakedCoder 7y agoI am just finding that out now. I read something that it could be due to the blue light from LED screens, TVs, phones, etc. I hope to end my insomnia too.
- jonah 7y agoBlue light before bed has been clearly shown to affect circadian rhythms and sleep. Some references here to get you started: https://justgetflux.com/research.html https://justgetflux.com/research.html
- joshmanders 7y agoI've felt this for a while, been actively monitoring my sleep for over a year and try to hit at average 7.5hr of sleep nightly. (This is what I found works best for me). I've found it helps with my mood, and my stress and also productivity. I've also found that it is possible to have the same effect of not enough sleep, by getting too much sleep.
- davnicwil 7y agoDo you find any variance in the 7.5 hour 'sweet spot' with the seasons (assuming you have them) or with your activities?
- joshmanders 7y agoNot much, no.
- InclinedPlane 7y agoAdditionally, a low stress non-crunch environment is better at retaining talent, which is significant on the short term but even more so on the long term (in a whole host of ways). Keeping people around longer means more retention of experience, less disruption to the corporate culture over time, more predictability in execution on projects, a more stable work environment (and less stress) for everyone else, etc, etc.
- hyperpallium 7y agoRelated: determination matters more than intelligence Maybe tools don't matter much either, but... essays on twitter?
- choto 7y agoSure, but languages and practices contribute significantly to sleep quality and stress level.
- smartbit 7y agoMy favorite talk on Sleep by William Dement https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hAw1z8GdE8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hAw1z8GdE8 September 23, 2008 Google Tech Talk Very entertaining.
- badsavage 7y agoI sleep well since i use Clojure
- nerder92 7y agoThis is gold.
- mnm1 7y agoOf course. This is the least controversial opinion out there and it borders on fact. Anyone who claims otherwise is an idiot or an exploiter. There's simply no substitute for sleep in any discipline or in life in general. It simply doesn't exist as far as we know. People who short themselves on sleep are self harming, often out of stupidity. I've been there as have many because it's part of our stupid work culture, but once one wises up, there's no going back. Sleep quality and stress levels matter more than anything. Period.