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Impact of a Night of Sleep Deprivation on Novice Developers’ Performance (2018)
- anoplus 7y agoProgrammer in a start-up here. Please do talk about this with your workaholic colleagues as I did! We need to create an industry standard here. Sleep is super important to success and happiness, and I just recently found that sleep is not enough. I need also rest. If I don't have rest and relaxation often I get tired for several days regardless of sleep time. Writing this after deliberate 5 minutes downtime.
- mistersquid 7y ago> Writing this after deliberate 5 minutes downtime. Pomodoro is another of those life-work habit enhancements which (counterintuitively) increases productivity and happiness.
- charliemil4 7y agoWhy don't you think your colleagues value sleep? Is it that there's no data, save qualitative, backing up your claims?
- anoplus 7y agoI think there is enough supportive data today, and that sleep deprivation still exists from cultural reasons. In my case it has improved as new folks joined the group and brought cultural change. Even if one knows the data alone, one might give in external pressure. I think its true for other things like smoking, alcohol etc.
- harlanji 7y agoI've been a pro programmer since age 15ish, now 34. I've been rebooting my health for the past 6 years where I found myself 50lbs overweight and isolated and alcoholic. Sleep and breaks have been an invisible health issue until about 3 years ago. Laying down boundaries about personal time was received very badly indeed. This was following 2 years of week-on/week-off on PagerDuty, with noisy frequent false alarms that were never a priority to fix(!). Since August I've been 100% out of tech but still in Silicon Valley, doing landscaping and moving and waiting, and in these industries I've for the first time had managers who've encouraged sleep, reminded me to drink water, and made breaks mandatory and it's amazing. When I hire programmers I'm going to treat them like landscapers.
- hinkley 7y agoI used to joke about solving problems from yesterday while taking a shower or crossing the street to the office but this is deadly serious. I’m solving problems not just because I’m doing a mundane task and have time to ruminate. It’s also because I just slept and am fully rested. If a mechanic treated his tools like we treat our bodies his coworkers would look down on him for sloppiness. Take care of your “tools”.
- bastih 7y agoThis may just be me, but when I was in charge of hiring a team, I ended up passing on sleep-foregoing candidates (often that wasn't the only thing, but it was a big factor for me). To this day, candidates that don't take care of getting enough sleep just to get things done, raise a red flag for me.
- GordonS 7y agoCurious... did you really ask candidates about their sleep patterns?
- Zekio 7y agodid I read that wrong or does it say I can get a 50% code quality improvement by just sleeping what ever is considered normal?
- luckylion 7y ago50% improvement for sleeping vs not sleeping at all.
- davemp 7y agoThat honestly seems conservative. The times I've missed an entire night I've been essentially useless or an actual detriment.
- jimbokun 7y agoIn reality, your "productivity" is likely to be negative, as you will need to spend even more time fixing the mistakes you made trying to program in a sleep deprived state.
- hinkley 7y agoOne of the first faculties to go is judgement. Those macho people who talk about toughing it out literally don’t know what they are talking about. You can’t self monitor when you’re loopy. And your recall of events is hampered too. The only measure you can count on is to look at the consequences after the fact, and there are a lot of fragile egos that can’t handle counting the cost of all their mistakes. If you won’t see them you can’t account for them in your mental math. I’ve tried to borrow some ideas from protocols for hypoxia. By the time you’re loopy you should not be making any decisions.
- deathanatos 7y agoI've seen this. Had a co-worker who was up most of a night dealing with a page. Came into work, wrote some brand new code, and since it was basically all written on that day, and all by him, it was easy to trace back to him / that event. The whole thing was riddled with bugs, and well below his usual quality level. Most of it got rewritten fairly quick, but yeah, if he'd taken the day off and then written it the next day, time would have been saved. I feel like it's hard to really know when you're in that state, too. Your mind is too apt to go "I'm fine."
- AstralStorm 7y agoNot exactly the best experimental design here. Instead, canadian cross should be used which would reduce and detect variation between individuals. (Same devs on multiple occasions, sometimes well slept, sometimes not. Matching tasks for both groups. Learning effect is controlled by swapping group order of task execution. This is fully factorial fully crossed design.) However, the magnitude is indeed big and the results probably valid but might not quite match up for experienced devs.
- charliemil4 7y ago(Shameless plug) we are developing a “study as a service” project to drive home the individuality and impact of sleep. The plan is to take a week with someone - comparing various “in bed” times along with quality of sleep to a simple, dynamic cognitive task. If anyone finds that interesting, please reach out to the email in my profile.
- mettamage 7y agoIMO, as far as research has been done in this field: the only point they need to make with experiments at the moment is that it has a huge impact. Hopefully, they now are able to get amazing grants because of these results to study it more in-depth. The politics of science >= doing actual good science [1] [1] Provided the right intentions are there (advancing truthful knowledge of humanity)
- jarym 7y ago“Our results also show that sleep-deprived developers make more fixes to syntactic mistakes in the source code.” That statement, in isolation, could be taken completely out of context. Of course no sane person would conclude that a sleep deprived developer can fix more bugs. However there are many executive-level staff that are definitely not sane.
- mcondit 7y agoYeah curious why more people didn't notice that strange phrasing. Not sure what the point of it was. Did they make more mistakes and therefore fix more of them?
- GordonS 7y agoMy guess here is that fixing those syntactic "mistakes" really means changing the code so it does the same thing, refactoring if you will. I catch myself doing this sometimes when I'm tired or disengaged - spending my time on pointless refactoring or gold-plating. Presumably because these things are easier than what I should be tackling, but trick me into feeling productive.
- itamarst 7y agoThis isn't a very surprising result: there's a whole body of research showing sleep deprivation reduces cognitive abilities. So why do programmers still sleep less than they need to? Often it's because they're working long hours, and to get time for the rest of their life they cut back on sleep. If that's you—it doesn't have to be that way. You can set boundaries at work (https://codewithoutrules.com/2019/04/03/setting-boundaries-at-work/ https://codewithoutrules.com/2019/04/03/setting-boundaries-a...), you can say no to your boss (https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/08/16/how-to-say-no/ https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/08/16/how-to-say-no/)... and you'll be doing your employer a favor because your output will go up.
- flyingpenguin 7y agoI think caffeine and other uppers play a large role as well. I am sitting at a desk doing nothing but I need my brain to be in the state its in when I am doing harrowing physical activity. My quality of sleep reflects this.
- mywittyname 7y agoI think this warrants a closer look. We do work in a profession that has a cognitive load that is wildly disproportionate to our physiological load. I suspect that some of us need heavy physical activity during the day in order to sleep well. Anecdotally, when I worked construction I had zero issues going to bed at 9pm and getting to work at 7 every day. But now that I sit at a desk for 9-12 hours a day, I'm rarely able to fall asleep by midnight and getting to work reliably by 8AM is impossible. Ironically, I have no issues sleeping "early" on the weekends when I spend the days out-and-about and doing house work.
- Marsymars 7y ago> I suspect that some of us need heavy physical activity during the day in order to sleep well. Yes, this is absolutely the case. I do software as a dayjob, but do an hour or two of heavy physical activity every day (or more on weekends), and sleep great nearly all the time. When I've had injuries that prevent me from my regular exercise routine, my quality of sleep takes a huge hit. To the point that last time I had a severe ankle sprain, I'd go to a gym (which I don't normally do) just to use one of those arm bike machines to tire myself out.
- d--b 7y agoYeah, and so we can conclude that sleeping is, after all, useful.
- wallflower 7y agoWhen I was younger, like many people, I thought of all-nighters as a thing to brag about. Now, I see sleep deprivation as a serious health debt that you pay nosebleed compound interest rates on. If you get less than your preferred amount of sleep, everyday living can become more complicated. Simple tasks can become dangerous. Do not walk down stairs without holding the hand rail if you are tired! Also, my sleep tracker confirms that, on average, it takes about one hour more of being in bed to get X hours of sleep. So if you need 8 hours of sleep, you need to be in bed around 9 hours! I aim for 7 hours (8 hours in bed).
- Robotbeat 7y agoSome of this is just aging, though. When younger, I could do all nighters regularly and bounce back quickly. Can’t do it any more without, as you say, nosebleed interest.
- cocochanel 7y agoThe harsh reality. Many of the lifestyle habits simply become exponentially harder as we age.
- chasd00 7y agoi watch my kids bounce back from and fight through illness in awe. My wife says i suffer from "man colds" but when i have a fever i'm completely incapacitated. I just lie in bed and think "... so this is how it ends" heh
- heymijo 7y ago"as a serious health debt" Except, sleep isn't a debt because the loss can't be repaid. This is one of many important things I have picked up from Dr. Matthew Walker who wrote "Why We Sleep" and has been doing the podcast rounds lately. Not to pick on you at all. It sounds like you have made some big realizations and are making fantastic changes. Realizing I can't make up sleep to pay off the "debt" has been eye opening.
- chasd00 7y agoThree team leads were sitting at an airport bar waiting on a flight. The first says "my developers are so strong they can code all day without a single break". The second lead replied "my developers are so dedicated they will work through the night without rest until the job is done". The third listened intently and then replied "my developers are professionals, they eat when they are hungry and they sleep when they are tired".
- dtwhitney 7y agoAww come on! No punch line?
- barbecue_sauce 7y agoMore of a koan than a joke.
- afturner 7y agoI think the punch line is that the last dude doesn't exist
- nicoburns 7y agoI have only ever worked for people that take this attitude, and now that I lead my own team, I am sure to make this clear to them too.
- tericho 7y agoHi I exist
- honestoHeminway 7y agoHe certainly sounds like a ilusion, suffered after too much work and to little caffeine.
- socceroos 7y ago"hi, I exist", said the manager who still exerts pressure on developers to work overtime with compressed project timelines and explicit and implicit pressures but pays lip service to healthy living.
- Uptrenda 7y agoI'd love to see a modafinil, caffeine, and nicotine group added to this study to see if there's any difference. 50% reduction in quality is a lot!
- AstralStorm 7y agoNot enough subjects to test modalities while excluding learning effects and losing predictive power. If you did 4x as many devs then a factored design is possible.
- GordonS 7y agoSample size of 1. I suffer from chronic fatigue, and caffeine definitely makes a difference, modafinil even more so. I don't take modafinil ever day, but when I do there is a definite improvement - I'm more alert, more focused and more productive.
- dakics 7y agoI've bought recently one of those cheap wrist bands. One of the most important features for me was ability to measure sleep quality in terms of "daily hours of deep sleep," whatever that scientifically means. Over the course of several months, I've been able to identify things which affect my sleep quality: * eating late: bad * drinking late: one beer... not really that bad * answering work emails until midnight: REALLY BAD (even while drinking soothing chamomile tea during soft rain) etc. I'm trying as reduce as many "bad" things as possible as I can feel a huge difference between 30 mins and 3+ hrs of deep sleep, as measured by the device. I feel much better during the day, can work more productively and, most importantly, my "fuse" seems to be much longer. Probably best $30 ever spent. (still missing weekend code binges of early 20s, though :/ )
- jdironman 7y agoWhat is the brand of the device? I am interested in getting one. I'm struggling today after little sleep, but I would also like insight on how much deep sleep I am getting.
- dakics 7y agoMi Band 3. It appears its sleep quality measurement through gyroscope/accelerator is accurate enough.
- chaostheory 7y agoApple Watch does the same thing, but you can choose from 3rd party apps as well.
- lobotryas 7y agoYou don’t even have to get a device to get started. A cheap (but useful) app like Sleep Cycle will give you lots of info to start noticing patterns.
- arethuza 7y agoI actually find that a couple of hours of coding on personal projects from 9 to 11 (but not later) actually has a calming effect on me that increases sleep quality. Mind you - I don't have hard data to support this!
- mettamage 7y agoSoooo..... Where can I do research like this? It seems easy, relevant and I'm academically equipped to do it (CS master psychology bachelor background).
- oddie 7y agoIt's exciting to see specific validation for our industry. We've seen a similar phenomenon with athletes, which drove us to create a sleep improvement app, called Rise Science (https://www.risescience.com https://www.risescience.com), for athletes that tells them what to do to improve their sleep tonight based on science. It's currently being used by both professional and collegiate teams across the NFL, MLB, NBA, MLS, and NCAAF. We're now taking what we've learned from athletes and adapting it so anyone can engage in a lifelong practice of healthy sleep. If you're interested in helping test the early beta version of our app sign up here: http://bit.ly/hacker-friends http://bit.ly/hacker-friends (for those interested in similar studies, here's a related paper from a friend of Rise at Stanford, where they quantify the impact of less sleep on cognitive performance using web search interactions as a proxy: http://timalthoff.de/docs/althoff-2017-population_scale_physiological_sensing.pdf http://timalthoff.de/docs/althoff-2017-population_scale_phys...)
- dimnsionofsound 7y agoIs a phone number really required to sign up?
- oddie 7y agoIt's been really helpful for quickly helping folks who have issues during the early beta. It's early, so not everything is perfect—we're working at full speed to make improvements and roll out new features.
- maxcut 7y agoLeBron James discusses his sleep routine in extent: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/21/lebron-james-reveals-the-nighttime-routine-that-sets-him-up-for-success.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/21/lebron-james-reveals-the-nig...
- fredley 7y agoStruggling to get to sleep? One thing that really helped me was taking care of what I was doing in the hour or two before bedtime. Staying up scrolling through work emails or reddit or news? Your mind's gonna be racing when you get to bed. Now I watch an hour of TV with my phone in another room - a completely passive activity that gives my mind time to settle down.
- Void_ 7y agoThis exactly makes all the difference for me. When I do anything even remotely exciting, I have harder time falling asleep. Not only that. I will also wake up 1-2 hours earlier and have very hard time getting back to sleep. If I do something calming, I have none of this issues. Watching movies is great. Think about something absolutely unrelated to your stress for 90 minutes. And yes, my insomnia is stress induced. If I’m on a holiday, which I haven’t been for couple years, I have none of those problems.
- tachyonbeam 7y agoReading books (or listening to audiobooks) is probably even better in terms of reducing exposure to blue light (which tends to suppress melatonin secretion). Personally: I recently realized that I should make an effort to work out sooner in the evening. I have an exercise bike at home and I tended to work out only after everything else was done, sometimes at 11PM, right before going to sleep. Exercise increases cortisol levels, so it's best to do it earlier in the day.
- serpi 7y agoeven that is too much excitement for me , dim lights or total darkness and just silent meditation sitting on a cushion for about 30-60 minutes is what it takes.
- itsangaris 7y agoReading works best for me
- i6mi6 7y agoDoes it matter what time of the day you sleep or just how many hours?
- inkydes 7y agoAre older engineers put out to pasture because they know better than to get caught up in all-night-no-break fervors? Asking employees to do this is like asking them to extend a line of credit that you can't pay back.
- rejectedstone 7y agoI had to stop at "quasi-experiment"
- AstralStorm 7y agoThat's just a bad name. This is essentially a nonrandomized unblinded controlled trial using representative sampling. Only two steps below a full RCT unless you suspect foul play. I'm not sure how you'd blind lack of sleep and that's not the point, so the only issue is lack of randomization. Much better than an observational study.
- tsumnia 7y agoQuasi-experiment is not necessarily a bad thing. It is to denote a study that does not have a traditional control-experiment structure with explicit pre- and post-measurements. This is particularly difficult to do with real time data analysis over time periods or with concepts that have ill-defined units of measurement. For example, productivity and learning would be considered ill-defined. How can you prove more sleep makes you more productive? Since that is difficult, you can instead do a quasi-experiment or case study to observe the effects.
- Merrill 7y agoWith the 996 system (9 am to 9 pm, 6 days per week), this would leave very little time for anything but working and sleeping. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/15/business/jack-ma-996-china/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/15/business/jack-ma-996-china/in...
- fao_ 7y agoIn most of the civilized world, including the PRC, that system is outright illegal.
- qvrjuec 7y agoWhich means nothing unfortunately, as companies are still encouraging employees to stick to this work schedule
- cardiffspaceman 7y ago996 is encouraged IN PUBLIC https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/15/business/jack-ma-996-china/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/15/business/jack-ma-996-china/in...
- dragonwriter 7y agoBeing on-paper illegal, however, doesn't mean that it's not common and de facto accepted.
- justbaker 7y agoDidn't know this was going on, but am now angry.
- manmal 7y agoI was sleep deprived today (only 4.5h of sleep thanks to catching up on GoT season 7), and I think I was 30-50% slower than usual. I didn’t notice throughout the day, but I just didn’t get as much done.
- itsangaris 7y ago"Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker is an amazing book and talks about this for of stuff and a lot more. Having read it, this is not surprising at all to me. Last year I read ~45 books, this book stood out as one of the best.
- itsangaris 7y agoOne of the things discussed in the book is how inhumane it is having subjects in an experiment deprive themselves of sleep (pull all-nighters); it has lasting effects on the body. As a result it is becoming much less common for experimenters to do this, so I'm a bit surprised at how this study was conducted.
- mjberg01 7y agoShameless plug - we built a product for orgs to deploy better sleep to their people. -> https://puresomni.com https://puresomni.com Our goal is simple - if we can help folks sleep better we can improve their overall health and ability to flourish. Happy to chat with anyone who is more interested in any way in what we are working on, has thoughts/feedback or would like to talk more about sleep in general.
- hacker_123 7y agoAs an individual, I had three sets of unanswered questions while visiting the site. 1) Can I use my insurance for part of this? Even if it isn't directly covered, would it count towards the max out of pocket? Can I use an FSA/HSA? 2) On the /learn page it isn't clear what happens after 4 weeks. Do I keep access to sleep tracking? Of less interest to me, what about the marketplace or sleep course? What is the cost to stay subscribed? The sign up flow explains the monthly subscription for physical goods, but I didn't click into that page before I decided to leave a comment and went back to double check the /learn page's contents. 3) Other than the sleep coach, what are the concierge features? Does the content pack include articles, videos, podcasts, "homework", or other things? Is the apnea screening a qualitative questionnaire or does it use data from the sleep tracking? Are the personalized tools software, psychological tactics, physical sleep aids, or something else? It certainly looks like an interesting product, but it's priced too high for me to buy before understanding it better.
- liggitt 7y agoI want to see the study on the impact of novice developers on senior developers' sleep deprivation
- z3t4 7y agoOne positive effect of being tired is that you stumble on more bugs. Add stress and tight deadline to that and many bugs will reveal them-self in order to annoy you, or trick you into yak shaving.
- CM30 7y agoKinda makes me wonder what the effects must be on those who work under endless 'crunch' type conditions, with 16 hour days/100 hour work weeks. That's pretty common in the video game development world, with articles saying conditions like that existed at the likes of Epic Games and Bioware. Also makes me wonder if it has any connection to how buggy some of these games are, or whether that's just a symptom of the modern system allowing you to patch stuff post launch.
- man2525 7y agoI was just diagnosed with severe sleep apnea. My troubleshooting has definitely declined some in the past five years. I was break-fix, however, for a good part of it, and a patch that needs another patch is a no-no for me, so I'm fairly systematic. Maybe I'll be able to make more leaps of faith as I recover. I certainly could use a productivity boost.