What's with this trend of multi-tweet posts being seen as noteworthy articles on HN?
Sleep quality and stress level matter more than languages or practices
21–30 of 57 posts
Re: Sleep quality and stress level matter more than languages or practices
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google has nap pods? Wow...that remindsof mats they used to have for us in preschool. Sheesh.
Can'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.
nice deflection
Re: Sleep quality and stress level matter more than languages or practices
#23If you are going to write that much, please use a better platform than Twitter.
Re: Sleep quality and stress level matter more than languages or practices
#24The 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 its…
Sleep is only a part of it — avoiding burnout (which is the real goal here) requires taking time not only to sleep, but also to work out, do your laundry, cook and eat food, see friends... we’re not just our jobs. We need lives outside of work or we will burn out — often at the most stressful and least opportune moment. If you’re working 100+ hours a week, you’re almost certainly offloading all that extra work to someone — usually a romantic partner, which can damage the most important relationship in your life.
That leaves at most 60 hours a week to truly dedicate to work. The people who work more are sacrificing quality of life for productivity. While a very small minority of people really can maintain that, most of us can’t. We shouldn’t take advice from the outliers who can. We shouldn’t work for companies where a schedule that leads to burnout is the norm. It’s a signal that the company wants to suck you dry then toss you away.
Furthermore, with knowledge workers... we often never stop thinking about a problem. The thinking is “real work” — I’ve had inspiration about how to solve a problem strike during dinner. Whip out the phone, send myself an e-mail, then deal with it in the morning. But the obsession with maximizing individual productivity at all costs is literally killing us.
Re: Sleep quality and stress level matter more than languages or practices
#25Yeah, 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.
Re: Sleep quality and stress level matter more than languages or practices
#26I 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.
Re: Sleep quality and stress level matter more than languages or practices
#27What's with this trend of multi-tweet posts being seen as noteworthy articles on HN?
Probably because the quality of the content mattered more than the platform it was posted it.
Re: Sleep quality and stress level matter more than languages or practices
#28I'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.
Re: Sleep quality and stress level matter more than languages or practices
#29Additionally, 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.
Re: Sleep quality and stress level matter more than languages or practices
#30I’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?
I think part of the problem is that it's so difficult to actually measure productivity in software development.