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Streaming aside, tyler1 has an almost inhuman dedication and focus when it comes to League of Legends. On Hacker News it's common to hear that programmers can't

by Permit 5y ago

Streaming aside, tyler1 has an almost inhuman dedication and focus when it comes to League of Legends. On Hacker News it's common to hear that programmers can't work (on classic programming tasks) for more than ~4 hours a day. I also feel exhausted after working for ~4 hours and have always wondered if this was some sort of mental trap I'd fallen into or a genuine limit. Games like League of Legends require complete focus and attention yet he somehow manages to regularly stream for 10 hours and sometimes reaches peaks of over 30 hours(!!!)[1]. Can you imagine solving leetcode problems (even easy ones) for 30 hours? In 2020 he paused streaming so he could focus solely on going from Diamond (mid-to-high tier) to Challenger (highest tier). If I recall correctly, he said he would sleep on the couch by his computer, wake up, play and go back to sleep on the couch after ~17 hours. I don't follow League of Legends (I prefer Dota) but tyler1 has always stood out to me as a person with an incomparable focus and dedication. I haven't seen anything similar in the Dota community and the only programmers that jump to mind would be geohotz or maybe Nick Winter[2]. [1] https://dotesports.com/news/tyler1-marathon-stream-top-lane-challenger-before-end-of-season-10 https://dotesports.com/news/tyler1-marathon-stream-top-lane-... [2] https://blog.nickwinter.net/posts/the-120-hour-workweek-epic-coding-time-lapse https://blog.nickwinter.net/posts/the-120-hour-workweek-epic...

kubb 5y ago
Do you really imply that playing the same game over and over again (with some variables but still) is the same as solving programming problems? The game is literally designed to hook you in and make you play one more and one more. You absolutely can autopilot through a game and still win. Don't get me wrong, the guy has a lot of dedication for sure. But playing League all day is really not like coding all day, I don't want anyone to get that impression.
- shanehoban 5y ago
  Nah, he's right. I play league. Coding all day is much less draining.
  - kubb 5y ago
    Except when you're drained you won't have the creativity to solve another programming task. But you will be able to queue up again. It also gets easier the more you play, because you're relying on the same skills that you build up with every match.
    - aidenn0 5y ago
      I haven't ever played a MOBA, but fixing bugs (which takes up a significant amount of developer time), seems to be about as rote as playing an RTS (which I have played, albeit almost 20 years ago).
- Permit 5y ago
  Have you played League of Legends or Dota 2 before? It will be hard to convey the mental/emotional exhaustion that most people feel from playing MOBAs at even a semi-competitive level. In my experience it's a lot different than playing FPS or other games. I have a distinct memory of finishing a game of Dota 2 and realizing that it felt as though I'd just finished a 3 hour exam. I didn't feel happy that we'd won, just relieved. I don't think this will convince you, but perhaps consider being open to the possibility that it genuinely is as difficult as solving most programming problems that we face in our day-to-day work. In my mind, it's at least as difficult as "easy" leetcode problems.
  - wiseowise 5y ago
    > In my mind, it's at least as difficult as "easy" leetcode problems. I have 3k hours in Dota 2. I know exactly what it is and how it works. It's really not. Not even close.
  - kubb 5y ago
    Yeah I've played League for a bit. It really does get easier the more you play. By the way, I've just read in the article that Tyler's been on Adderall since first grade, I guess that will help him stay focused.
    - abledon 5y ago
      wow, that explains so much, he usually plays it offlike its only the pre-workout bloodrush hes drinking
  - Philip-J-Fry 5y ago
    I've played League of Legends for nearly 10 years. Not to take anything away from Tyler1, because he really goes above and beyond, but it really doesn't take much mental focus or anything really to play it. Programming? It takes focus, you really have to think sometimes. But League? When I'm tired the game plays itself. It just feels like muscle memory. It might take a bit more effort to play at a consistently high level. But I'm pretty sure it's mostly muscle memory for him too. There's very little actual thinking other than the big picture of what objectives to take and I'm sure when he's playing for 20+ hours he's just on autopilot for the majority of the time. To put it into comparison with how little mental power it personally takes me, I like to watch a lot of Anime, that's Japanese animation with English subtitles. I can't watch Anime if I'm tired because keeping track of subtitles and what's on screen actually takes a substantial amount of mental power. But I can bash out 5 games of LoL back to back when I'm equally as tired.
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  There's a world of difference between playing league casually and competitively. No one at his level of play can autopilot through a game and still win.
  - ZephyrBlu 5y ago
    That's not true. The skill disparity between the very top players (100-500), and the rest of the players in the top league is usually very large.
    - 1_player 5y ago
      The point of match-making is playing with people your same level. It doesn't matter what level tyler1 is, he'll be playing against people that will challenge and give him a hard time. You're not matched against people less skilled than you where you can just "relax" and walk it in. When you reach your skill ceiling, you have to work hard just to remain there.
      - ZephyrBlu 5y ago
        > When you reach your skill ceiling, you have to work hard just to remain there Top players hit the ceiling of the MMR system before they hit their skill ceiling. When you get to the very top of a ladder, matchmaking stops working correctly. Partly because the top few players are insanely good compared to everyone else and partly because there are literally not enough people online at any one time for an equal match to be made.
    - seabird 5y ago
      He IS a very top player (solo Challenger, top 200 in 4/5 roles in the game). There's not a chance in hell he's able to go on autopilot at that point, even in slightly lower rank games during his grinds where he has to try and win losing games with a team that's not good enough to help him do it. The only reason he's not playing as a salaried professional is that he's in a bad region to do so and makes more being a personality.
- 1_player 5y ago
  At gunpoint, I'd rather code 12 hours a day than play LoL or CS:GO 12 hours a day. Because programming is less exhausting and my code doesn't insult my mother on VOIP. And I say that as a gamer and esports enthusiast.
  - hogFeast 5y ago
    I used to play League...then I found out everyone who played that game had slept with my mother.
- tester756 5y ago
  I have 5?k hours in LoL around high plat / in previous season low diamond and I'd say that LoL while being different from competitive programming is still exhausting if you want to play it with full focus for a few hours. Of course there's difference between playing ARAMs for fun and tryharding on "relatively competent" ELO where you try to do not commit mistakes as hard as you can and games are not "fiestas" (lack of strategy, just fighting) >You absolutely can autopilot through a game and still win. Significant part of day2day programming can be pretty brainless/trivial too - yet another gluing json over http. Don't get me wrong, there are insanely exhausting projects too. During programming you can take break whenever you want, go to kitchen, watch memes, hn, read news, blabla, meanwhile when you're in game, then you can't*.
  - evandwight 5y ago
    How often do you engage your slow brain (from thinking fast and slow)? I feel like it's like speed chess and not normal chess. You have no time to think till after the game, you just have to do and trust your gut. The slow brain is what exhausts you.
    - tester756 5y ago
      There are slower and faster moments. e.g after recalling/killing enemies/dying you have like 30sec to look around map and think what you as team want to do / achieve and how to do that It depends on the stage of the game, but generally when enemies are around, then you may don't have time to think.
      - wiseowise 5y ago
        > e.g after recalling/killing enemies/dying you have like 30sec to look around map and think what you as team want to do / achieve and how to do that 30 seconds is infinite in games like that.
      - evandwight 5y ago
        That's been my experience too. I never felt exhausted playing. Thinking about what to do better between games was more draining. I've never played competitively, though I did get to about top 3000 in North America. Thanks for sharing!
- arcsonnet 5y ago
  This comment shows a remarkable disregard for the level of skill required to compete at the highest level. You don't encounter a lot of autopiloting at the highest level of competition. The people you compete against are trying as hard as they possibly can to beat you, and it takes a tremendous amount of focus and ingenuity to outplay them and win. You gloss over the details of that monumental task with reductive phrasing - but I think you're overlooking a lot. I was at a party once, talking to a stranger about why I loved programming so much. They said: "Yeah, but at the end of the day, it's _just_ programming, right?". That's how this comment reads to me - "At the end of the day, it's just playing a game, right?" There's a reason that some people compete at the highest level and some are in the fat part of the bell curve.
  - kubb 5y ago
    Your response is really not adequate to what I wrote above, you seem to be projecting some past experiences that you had with people not giving you credit on me and it feels like a very unfortunate and provocative stance. If I wanted to respond in the same tone, I could say: "The guy is not a pro player, he doesn't compete at the highest level, he just grinds solo queue for 10 hours per day on Adderall. He got this way because he had a mixture of talent and addiction susceptibility. He got addicted to the dopamine hits that the free to play game was meticulously designed to deliver in a pattern that makes the player unable to stop even if he hates it and feels miserable." But I will say this: I think you're misinterpreting my comment as scorn when in reality it's my perspective based on my experiences with coding and playing this game. I know both, so I believe that my opinion is valuable and I decided to share it.
  - wiseowise 5y ago
    > There's a reason that some people compete at the highest level and some are in the fat part of the bell curve. It's the same as with any activity. Time * dedication * (1 + natural talent) > This comment shows a remarkable disregard for the level of skill required to compete at the highest level. I've done both, I'm not disregarding amount of skill and dedication it takes. But it is completely different from programming. Competetive gaming is akin to real sports, more about situation, luck and reaction rather than natural wits. All games are following patterns which you can learn just by spending time in game which adheres to limited set of rules defined by game logic.
- panick21_ 5y ago
  Playing a high level game of Starcraft or Dota is more exhausting to me then programming. With programming I have to think of some designs, spend some times with the tooling, setting things up, to all the busy work surrounding the core problem and so on. Sure there are moments when you really have to think very hard about what you do as well, but its not constant. I can take easy breaks. Run some tests and so on. When playing a game you have to be totally focused for longer periods and not just focus but also execute and handle the concept of being activity opposed. Its like if you were programming and the compiler was activity being evil.
- melonbar 5y ago
  I humbly disagree, and if you have not competed at the pro level in an RTS (Starcraft is another absurdly hard game that requires hundreds of actions a minute) then I believe your view is skewed. When I code all day there are tasks I can auto pilot. Rebase from gerrit, an amend, maybe hunting down answers on Stack Overflow. Sure, I get that coding != video games. But the skills Tyler has or someone who plays as a pro Star Craft player are Masters at a craft that takes way more than auto pilot. In many cases it is physically demanding too and I think you’re giving the wrong impression. It’s not a game at that point, it’s a profession, and an absurdly tough one at that. Machines can beat people at chess. Our AI had struggled for years to beat humans at Star Craft. I find that inspiring, and am in awe some people can push themselves so hard to be that good.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
NelsonMinar 5y ago
You skipped over the year and a half when he was banned from LoL for being such a raging asshole. https://www.polygon.com/2017/1/10/14179366/league-of-legends-riot-ban-tyler1 https://www.polygon.com/2017/1/10/14179366/league-of-legends...
butwhywhyoh 5y ago
Some heroin users are also incredibly dedicated to finding their next score. They show intense focus when it comes to seeking out their next hit. Why do you think demonstrating focus on an addictive video game is the same as solving open-ended computer science problems?
- aidenn0 5y ago
  There's huge amounts of space between "open-ended computer science problems" (your words) and "classic programming tasks" (gp's words)
- Permit 5y ago
  > Why do you think demonstrating focus on an addictive video game is the same as solving open-ended computer science problems? Firstly, I probably wouldn't classify the work most of us do as "solving open-ended computer science problems" so I'm not trying to make a comparison to that work. Secondly, I guess it stands out to me because I watch other people play the same addictive game and are unable to play at a high level for the same lengths of time. If it were just an addictive property of the game, we should expect to see thousands of tyler1's as we see thousands of heroin addicts. Since we do not, it makes me think that there's something special with him.
  - wiseowise 5y ago
    Tyler is just "high level" heroin addict so to say. There are indeed thousands of heroin addicts, just look at online of Dota 2.
aidenn0 5y ago
My dad worked for startups on-and-off and he definitely was productive for a lot more than 8 hours per day. He does agree that for truly novel work there's a limit, but for every novel problem to solve, there's dozens[1] of reported bugs to investigate, so there's plenty of work to fit between work on new things. 1: That number seems small today, but I got the sense that bug-discovery by customers at least was limited by the low number of customers that a b2b startup had in the 80s.
- megablast 5y ago
  You are talking for your dad?? What??
  - aidenn0 5y ago
    He has far more experience working 60+ hour weeks then I do, so I defer to his wisdom in this case.
handrous 5y ago
I think the impressive thing is doing it day after day. I can do lots of things, including programming, for 12+ hours. The trouble is, after a day or two of that, I desperately don't want to do whatever-it-is for several days or weeks. I want to go do other stuff. It's the doing it day after day on a regular schedule that makes me feel like I never really recover from programming, and just want to zone out and stare at the wall until bed time, having very little energy left for anything either fun or productive, after 4-5 hours, most days. I'll even do that with video games. Get the family out of the house and give me a weekend, I'll play vidja games for like 16 hours. Then wake up the second day and not want to touch a game for at least a week, and instead start doing home improvement projects or whatever. Or sit outside and read a book all day. Not because I feel like I should, but because it's the thing I most want to be doing, and I have zero desire to look at a screen for a good long while. The regularity of work is what makes it so damn draining, for me. I'm sure it'd ruin gaming for me in short order, too, though I'd have fared a lot better at it back when I was in my teens or early 20s than I would now, for sure. I can't do 30 waking hours of anything now. 24 just about ruins me. I could get to about 36-38 before hitting a wall and passing out for like 12 hours, back then. 30 wasn't that big a deal, and I hit that mark pretty often (usually, yeah, playing video games for a good chunk of it).
andrewxdiamond 5y ago
It’s worth noting that tyler1 is a hugely toxic individual and is one of the most visible “role models” for massively toxic and aggressive behavior. “Focus” aside, his overall contribution to the sport is tainted with his abhorrent behavior.
dathinab 5y ago
I don't think leetcode problems are a good example. But I have worked (programmed) two 9h days without sleeping in-between before and it worked somehow well??? Through normally I often have problems working 8h a day without taking a fairly long lunch brake. But then sometimes I just went 10h with close to no brakes (some ad-hock food) without even realizing it. It's still puzzles me what makes the difference.
wiseowise 5y ago
You're comparing apples to oranges. I could also play MMORPGs and Dota 2 for 10 hours straight without any break, I can barely sit one hour solving LC/learning something. And before you account this to age, even now I could spend whole day playing some addictive game like a robot.
_prototype_ 5y ago
He takes Adderall my dude. I'm a developer and I use absolutely no cognitive enhancers. If I took Adderall I would be able to code for 20 hours straight. I took a small dose back in college and that stuff is insanely good for long hours at anything. Also, I'm speculating here, but I think he is on Testosterone Replacement Therapy, which also has insane energy, mood and cognitive enhancements. Lastly he takes a ton of stimulants. I don't for a moment think he's working purely off "natural" energy.

by Permit 5y ago

kubb 5y ago

Do you really imply that playing the same game over and over again (with some variables but still) is the same as solving programming problems? The game is literally designed to hook you in and make you play one more and one more. You absolutely can autopilot through a game and still win. Don't get me wrong, the guy has a lot of dedication for sure. But playing League all day is really not like coding all day, I don't want anyone to get that impression.

shanehoban 5y ago
Nah, he's right. I play league. Coding all day is much less draining.
- kubb 5y ago
  Except when you're drained you won't have the creativity to solve another programming task. But you will be able to queue up again. It also gets easier the more you play, because you're relying on the same skills that you build up with every match.
  - aidenn0 5y ago
    I haven't ever played a MOBA, but fixing bugs (which takes up a significant amount of developer time), seems to be about as rote as playing an RTS (which I have played, albeit almost 20 years ago).
Permit 5y ago
Have you played League of Legends or Dota 2 before? It will be hard to convey the mental/emotional exhaustion that most people feel from playing MOBAs at even a semi-competitive level. In my experience it's a lot different than playing FPS or other games. I have a distinct memory of finishing a game of Dota 2 and realizing that it felt as though I'd just finished a 3 hour exam. I didn't feel happy that we'd won, just relieved. I don't think this will convince you, but perhaps consider being open to the possibility that it genuinely is as difficult as solving most programming problems that we face in our day-to-day work. In my mind, it's at least as difficult as "easy" leetcode problems.
- wiseowise 5y ago
  > In my mind, it's at least as difficult as "easy" leetcode problems. I have 3k hours in Dota 2. I know exactly what it is and how it works. It's really not. Not even close.
- kubb 5y ago
  Yeah I've played League for a bit. It really does get easier the more you play. By the way, I've just read in the article that Tyler's been on Adderall since first grade, I guess that will help him stay focused.
  - abledon 5y ago
    wow, that explains so much, he usually plays it offlike its only the pre-workout bloodrush hes drinking
- Philip-J-Fry 5y ago
  I've played League of Legends for nearly 10 years. Not to take anything away from Tyler1, because he really goes above and beyond, but it really doesn't take much mental focus or anything really to play it. Programming? It takes focus, you really have to think sometimes. But League? When I'm tired the game plays itself. It just feels like muscle memory. It might take a bit more effort to play at a consistently high level. But I'm pretty sure it's mostly muscle memory for him too. There's very little actual thinking other than the big picture of what objectives to take and I'm sure when he's playing for 20+ hours he's just on autopilot for the majority of the time. To put it into comparison with how little mental power it personally takes me, I like to watch a lot of Anime, that's Japanese animation with English subtitles. I can't watch Anime if I'm tired because keeping track of subtitles and what's on screen actually takes a substantial amount of mental power. But I can bash out 5 games of LoL back to back when I'm equally as tired.
colinmhayes 5y ago
There's a world of difference between playing league casually and competitively. No one at his level of play can autopilot through a game and still win.
- ZephyrBlu 5y ago
  That's not true. The skill disparity between the very top players (100-500), and the rest of the players in the top league is usually very large.
  - 1_player 5y ago
    The point of match-making is playing with people your same level. It doesn't matter what level tyler1 is, he'll be playing against people that will challenge and give him a hard time. You're not matched against people less skilled than you where you can just "relax" and walk it in. When you reach your skill ceiling, you have to work hard just to remain there.
    - ZephyrBlu 5y ago
      > When you reach your skill ceiling, you have to work hard just to remain there Top players hit the ceiling of the MMR system before they hit their skill ceiling. When you get to the very top of a ladder, matchmaking stops working correctly. Partly because the top few players are insanely good compared to everyone else and partly because there are literally not enough people online at any one time for an equal match to be made.
  - seabird 5y ago
    He IS a very top player (solo Challenger, top 200 in 4/5 roles in the game). There's not a chance in hell he's able to go on autopilot at that point, even in slightly lower rank games during his grinds where he has to try and win losing games with a team that's not good enough to help him do it. The only reason he's not playing as a salaried professional is that he's in a bad region to do so and makes more being a personality.
1_player 5y ago
At gunpoint, I'd rather code 12 hours a day than play LoL or CS:GO 12 hours a day. Because programming is less exhausting and my code doesn't insult my mother on VOIP. And I say that as a gamer and esports enthusiast.
- hogFeast 5y ago
  I used to play League...then I found out everyone who played that game had slept with my mother.
tester756 5y ago
I have 5?k hours in LoL around high plat / in previous season low diamond and I'd say that LoL while being different from competitive programming is still exhausting if you want to play it with full focus for a few hours. Of course there's difference between playing ARAMs for fun and tryharding on "relatively competent" ELO where you try to do not commit mistakes as hard as you can and games are not "fiestas" (lack of strategy, just fighting) >You absolutely can autopilot through a game and still win. Significant part of day2day programming can be pretty brainless/trivial too - yet another gluing json over http. Don't get me wrong, there are insanely exhausting projects too. During programming you can take break whenever you want, go to kitchen, watch memes, hn, read news, blabla, meanwhile when you're in game, then you can't*.
- evandwight 5y ago
  How often do you engage your slow brain (from thinking fast and slow)? I feel like it's like speed chess and not normal chess. You have no time to think till after the game, you just have to do and trust your gut. The slow brain is what exhausts you.
  - tester756 5y ago
    There are slower and faster moments. e.g after recalling/killing enemies/dying you have like 30sec to look around map and think what you as team want to do / achieve and how to do that It depends on the stage of the game, but generally when enemies are around, then you may don't have time to think.
    - wiseowise 5y ago
      > e.g after recalling/killing enemies/dying you have like 30sec to look around map and think what you as team want to do / achieve and how to do that 30 seconds is infinite in games like that.
    - evandwight 5y ago
      That's been my experience too. I never felt exhausted playing. Thinking about what to do better between games was more draining. I've never played competitively, though I did get to about top 3000 in North America. Thanks for sharing!
arcsonnet 5y ago
This comment shows a remarkable disregard for the level of skill required to compete at the highest level. You don't encounter a lot of autopiloting at the highest level of competition. The people you compete against are trying as hard as they possibly can to beat you, and it takes a tremendous amount of focus and ingenuity to outplay them and win. You gloss over the details of that monumental task with reductive phrasing - but I think you're overlooking a lot. I was at a party once, talking to a stranger about why I loved programming so much. They said: "Yeah, but at the end of the day, it's _just_ programming, right?". That's how this comment reads to me - "At the end of the day, it's just playing a game, right?" There's a reason that some people compete at the highest level and some are in the fat part of the bell curve.
- kubb 5y ago
  Your response is really not adequate to what I wrote above, you seem to be projecting some past experiences that you had with people not giving you credit on me and it feels like a very unfortunate and provocative stance. If I wanted to respond in the same tone, I could say: "The guy is not a pro player, he doesn't compete at the highest level, he just grinds solo queue for 10 hours per day on Adderall. He got this way because he had a mixture of talent and addiction susceptibility. He got addicted to the dopamine hits that the free to play game was meticulously designed to deliver in a pattern that makes the player unable to stop even if he hates it and feels miserable." But I will say this: I think you're misinterpreting my comment as scorn when in reality it's my perspective based on my experiences with coding and playing this game. I know both, so I believe that my opinion is valuable and I decided to share it.
- wiseowise 5y ago
  > There's a reason that some people compete at the highest level and some are in the fat part of the bell curve. It's the same as with any activity. Time * dedication * (1 + natural talent) > This comment shows a remarkable disregard for the level of skill required to compete at the highest level. I've done both, I'm not disregarding amount of skill and dedication it takes. But it is completely different from programming. Competetive gaming is akin to real sports, more about situation, luck and reaction rather than natural wits. All games are following patterns which you can learn just by spending time in game which adheres to limited set of rules defined by game logic.
panick21_ 5y ago
Playing a high level game of Starcraft or Dota is more exhausting to me then programming. With programming I have to think of some designs, spend some times with the tooling, setting things up, to all the busy work surrounding the core problem and so on. Sure there are moments when you really have to think very hard about what you do as well, but its not constant. I can take easy breaks. Run some tests and so on. When playing a game you have to be totally focused for longer periods and not just focus but also execute and handle the concept of being activity opposed. Its like if you were programming and the compiler was activity being evil.
melonbar 5y ago
I humbly disagree, and if you have not competed at the pro level in an RTS (Starcraft is another absurdly hard game that requires hundreds of actions a minute) then I believe your view is skewed. When I code all day there are tasks I can auto pilot. Rebase from gerrit, an amend, maybe hunting down answers on Stack Overflow. Sure, I get that coding != video games. But the skills Tyler has or someone who plays as a pro Star Craft player are Masters at a craft that takes way more than auto pilot. In many cases it is physically demanding too and I think you’re giving the wrong impression. It’s not a game at that point, it’s a profession, and an absurdly tough one at that. Machines can beat people at chess. Our AI had struggled for years to beat humans at Star Craft. I find that inspiring, and am in awe some people can push themselves so hard to be that good.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

NelsonMinar 5y ago

You skipped over the year and a half when he was banned from LoL for being such a raging asshole. https://www.polygon.com/2017/1/10/14179366/league-of-legends-riot-ban-tyler1 https://www.polygon.com/2017/1/10/14179366/league-of-legends...

butwhywhyoh 5y ago

Some heroin users are also incredibly dedicated to finding their next score. They show intense focus when it comes to seeking out their next hit. Why do you think demonstrating focus on an addictive video game is the same as solving open-ended computer science problems?

aidenn0 5y ago
There's huge amounts of space between "open-ended computer science problems" (your words) and "classic programming tasks" (gp's words)
Permit 5y ago
> Why do you think demonstrating focus on an addictive video game is the same as solving open-ended computer science problems? Firstly, I probably wouldn't classify the work most of us do as "solving open-ended computer science problems" so I'm not trying to make a comparison to that work. Secondly, I guess it stands out to me because I watch other people play the same addictive game and are unable to play at a high level for the same lengths of time. If it were just an addictive property of the game, we should expect to see thousands of tyler1's as we see thousands of heroin addicts. Since we do not, it makes me think that there's something special with him.
- wiseowise 5y ago
  Tyler is just "high level" heroin addict so to say. There are indeed thousands of heroin addicts, just look at online of Dota 2.

aidenn0 5y ago

My dad worked for startups on-and-off and he definitely was productive for a lot more than 8 hours per day. He does agree that for truly novel work there's a limit, but for every novel problem to solve, there's dozens[1] of reported bugs to investigate, so there's plenty of work to fit between work on new things. 1: That number seems small today, but I got the sense that bug-discovery by customers at least was limited by the low number of customers that a b2b startup had in the 80s.

megablast 5y ago
You are talking for your dad?? What??
- aidenn0 5y ago
  He has far more experience working 60+ hour weeks then I do, so I defer to his wisdom in this case.

handrous 5y ago

I think the impressive thing is doing it day after day. I can do lots of things, including programming, for 12+ hours. The trouble is, after a day or two of that, I desperately don't want to do whatever-it-is for several days or weeks. I want to go do other stuff. It's the doing it day after day on a regular schedule that makes me feel like I never really recover from programming, and just want to zone out and stare at the wall until bed time, having very little energy left for anything either fun or productive, after 4-5 hours, most days. I'll even do that with video games. Get the family out of the house and give me a weekend, I'll play vidja games for like 16 hours. Then wake up the second day and not want to touch a game for at least a week, and instead start doing home improvement projects or whatever. Or sit outside and read a book all day. Not because I feel like I should, but because it's the thing I most want to be doing, and I have zero desire to look at a screen for a good long while. The regularity of work is what makes it so damn draining, for me. I'm sure it'd ruin gaming for me in short order, too, though I'd have fared a lot better at it back when I was in my teens or early 20s than I would now, for sure. I can't do 30 waking hours of anything now. 24 just about ruins me. I could get to about 36-38 before hitting a wall and passing out for like 12 hours, back then. 30 wasn't that big a deal, and I hit that mark pretty often (usually, yeah, playing video games for a good chunk of it).

andrewxdiamond 5y ago

It’s worth noting that tyler1 is a hugely toxic individual and is one of the most visible “role models” for massively toxic and aggressive behavior. “Focus” aside, his overall contribution to the sport is tainted with his abhorrent behavior.

dathinab 5y ago

I don't think leetcode problems are a good example. But I have worked (programmed) two 9h days without sleeping in-between before and it worked somehow well??? Through normally I often have problems working 8h a day without taking a fairly long lunch brake. But then sometimes I just went 10h with close to no brakes (some ad-hock food) without even realizing it. It's still puzzles me what makes the difference.

wiseowise 5y ago

You're comparing apples to oranges. I could also play MMORPGs and Dota 2 for 10 hours straight without any break, I can barely sit one hour solving LC/learning something. And before you account this to age, even now I could spend whole day playing some addictive game like a robot.

_prototype_ 5y ago

He takes Adderall my dude. I'm a developer and I use absolutely no cognitive enhancers. If I took Adderall I would be able to code for 20 hours straight. I took a small dose back in college and that stuff is insanely good for long hours at anything. Also, I'm speculating here, but I think he is on Testosterone Replacement Therapy, which also has insane energy, mood and cognitive enhancements. Lastly he takes a ton of stimulants. I don't for a moment think he's working purely off "natural" energy.