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Impact of a Night of Sleep Deprivation on Novice Developers’ Performance (2018)

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Re: Impact of a Night of Sleep Deprivation on Novice Developers’ Performance (2018)

#111

Post by dsfyu404ed »

wallflower wrote: post #10

When 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 track…

When you're young enough to be pulling all nighters falling down the stairs is a minor inconvenience. When you're middle aged it's a serious health emergency.

Re: Impact of a Night of Sleep Deprivation on Novice Developers’ Performance (2018)

#112

Post by mywittyname »

flyingpenguin wrote: post #28
itamarst wrote: post #8

This 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/sett…

I 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.

I 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.

Re: Impact of a Night of Sleep Deprivation on Novice Developers’ Performance (2018)

#113

Post by dsfyu404ed »

chasd00 wrote: post #21
wallflower wrote: post #10

When 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 track…

i use to think this way too. When i was HS living out in the countryside of North Texas the father of a friend of mine would take me hunting and target shooting a lot. He said he did an experiment once where he shot 3 groups of 5 shots then measured his precision and accuracy. Next, he drank a beer (i know, not the wisest thing to do) then repeated the shooting exercise. He did this for a few iterations and his concl…

But your body doesn't absorb the alcohol instantly. Those test results make no sense from a medical standpoint. There should be a lag between drinking and the performance hit.

Re: Impact of a Night of Sleep Deprivation on Novice Developers’ Performance (2018)

#114

Post by maccard »

charliemil4 wrote: post #39
dakics wrote: post #26

I'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: REA…

Do you think there are any shortcuts to the months of experimenting? I'd also be interested to learn how you validated your hypothesis (one night of sleep, a few nights of emails at midnight?)

It didn't take me months to figure it out (not OP), you might get some insights quickly. Get one of the fitness trackers(Fitbit/MiBand/apple watch) and wear the watch for a week, then take a note of the things you're doing in the evenings and see how if affects your baseline from the previous week. For me, exercise was a clear winner on the first day - I spend less time awake in bed, sleep longer and higher quality _every_ day I exercise. Others, like working late, or playing video games late took longer to figure out.

Re: Impact of a Night of Sleep Deprivation on Novice Developers’ Performance (2018)

#115

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

ben_w wrote: post #109
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What other mammals make their young sleep wear pants?

Most other species grow their own pants, which remain permanently attached. Effectively. :)

With the exception of sheep, at which point we must ask - what other species steals another species pants?

Re: Impact of a Night of Sleep Deprivation on Novice Developers’ Performance (2018)

#116

Post by joshuahughes »

blotter_paper wrote: post #107
loco5niner wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would rather roll the dice on a one-off suffocation than... WHAT!? No way. SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) is a real danger and not something to be dismissed lightly. http://www.idph.state.il.us/sids/sids_factsheet.htm

I'm not trolling, nor do I feel I'm dismissing it lightly. I'd rather take a relatively minor risk of death than knowingly inflict whatever psychological trauma comes from forcing an infant to sleep alone. I think the horror of this is seriously downplayed by our society. It's relatively safe to leave a baby in a box now, but this hasn't been the case for our deep evolutionary past. If you're a baby being left in a b…

Wow. Psychological trauma? Horror? Freaking out? I'm not sure what makes you think babies experience those things when "forced to sleep alone", but my two kids seemed pretty content in their cribs.

Letting your kids share your bed might seem like a lovely thing to do, but I've heard so many friends complain that their kids are still co-sleeping 5+ YEARS later, and that comes with a huge impact on stuff like sleep quality and having a sex life.

Re: Impact of a Night of Sleep Deprivation on Novice Developers’ Performance (2018)

#117

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

blotter_paper wrote: post #107
loco5niner wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would rather roll the dice on a one-off suffocation than... WHAT!? No way. SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) is a real danger and not something to be dismissed lightly. http://www.idph.state.il.us/sids/sids_factsheet.htm

I'm not trolling, nor do I feel I'm dismissing it lightly. I'd rather take a relatively minor risk of death than knowingly inflict whatever psychological trauma comes from forcing an infant to sleep alone. I think the horror of this is seriously downplayed by our society. It's relatively safe to leave a baby in a box now, but this hasn't been the case for our deep evolutionary past. If you're a baby being left in a b…

Are you a parent? Are these hypotheticals you're running, or speaking from your own experience?

Re: Impact of a Night of Sleep Deprivation on Novice Developers’ Performance (2018)

#118

Post by dragonwriter »

frosted-flakes wrote: post #83
andrei_says_ wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cosleeping can dramatically reduce sleep deprivation for parents. We humans have evolved to cosleep with our babies. In a cosleeping situation the baby does not experience terror (a baby left alone in nature has zero survival chances so this terror is programmed and so leaving a baby to sleep alone is counterproductive and cruel), can feel the warmth and heartbeat of the mother, can feed without and before fully waki…

Isn't the risk of accidentally suffocating the baby quite high when co-sleeping? I think I'd prefer a bed-side crib.

> Isn't the risk of accidentally suffocating the baby quite high when co-sleeping?

No, it's on average quite low, but notably higher than not cosleeping, and the consequences are severe so many people generally prefer (and the medical community generally recommends) to avoid the risk, at least as a regular practice.

IIRC, there is some reason to believe that the on average risk is misleadingly high for many concrete cases, though, because it seems like there are other factors without which the risk does not increase [EDIT: nearly as much as the on-average increase would suggest] (and with which the risk increase is much higher than the on-average increase), but I forget the details.

Re: Impact of a Night of Sleep Deprivation on Novice Developers’ Performance (2018)

#119

Post by gonehome »

heymijo wrote: post #12
wallflower wrote: post #10

When 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 track…

"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 open…

Yeah, but the reasoning I heard from him on that made no sense and was not clarified.

From what I remember he said if you stay up all night you don't sleep 16 hours the next night to make up for the missing 8 hours (you may only sleep 12) therefore you never make up that 4.

I'd suspect that it doesn't work that way and you can catch up without requiring double the amount of time (there's probably a consistent overhead).

If I'm missing some core of his argument please let me know, but from what I heard it made me dismiss the rest as probably bad.

Re: Impact of a Night of Sleep Deprivation on Novice Developers’ Performance (2018)

#120

Post by mcondit »

jarym wrote: post #7

“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.

Yeah 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?
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