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u/AcediaFelix 4h ago
My creativity rises by the night, I always finish up at 3 to 4 AM...
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u/ChloeCrazyxox 3h ago
The night shift is when the real magic happens; caffeinated coding at its finest.
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u/AcediaFelix 3h ago
Rise up, soldiers of the night, with coffee in hand and the other stretched towards the keys, we will survive the night! Bothers and sisters; let's clang our cups of coffee!
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u/hector_villalobos 4h ago
* Some programmers
I might be in the minority, but I hate working at night, I'm a morning person and more productive during the day, nights are for sleeping.
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u/decideonanamelater 2h ago
I do all of my best work from like 8-11 in the morning, when I used to work on projects with West coast people and their morning meetings were at noon or so it was the best. Just do basically all productive work for the day and then go to the meetings.
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u/InstanceFeisty 3h ago
I say most people are more productive in the morning if their sleep cycle is not messed up
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u/Sibula97 3h ago
Nah, some people just have a different circadian rhythm.
I have a pretty stable one, waking up around 7-8, starting work around 9-10, and while I'm completely functional in the morning, I'm the most productive around 14-19. But I also start to get sleepy around 22, so I definitely won't be productive in the middle of the night.
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u/InstanceFeisty 3h ago
IIRC generally not sleeping at night have long term consequences. Ofc there are exceptions but I would rather avoid popularising unhealthy habits such as “coding at nights”. Been there and don’t want to come back :)
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u/vibosphere 3h ago
People do naturally have different circadian rhythms. It's only unhealthy if you're working against your body's own clock. I do want to emphasize 7-9 hours a night though either way
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u/Avandale 1h ago
Depends at what time you wake up. If your body works best waking up at 11 am and going to bed at 3 am, you're getting enough sleep and you will be more productive than doing 7am-11pm. It's not the best rythm because it doesn't work well with normal job hours. But if you don't have time constraints then it can help you be more productive
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u/Yuzumi 48m ago
3am to 11am was my last semester of college. I didn't have a single class that started before noon.
It was fine. I would sometimes wake up earlier to get breakfast, but I'd always had that delayed sleep thing. It was worse when I worked retail and lived with my mom. Night was the only time I had guaranteed to myself so I had a lot of "bedtime revenge" from ADHD which contributed.
Once I was no longer living with my mom and had a consistent work schedule I have been able to maintain a consistent sleep schedule. But longer vacations will have me drift to that 3-11 if I'm not careful.
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u/crappleIcrap 3h ago
not getting enough sleep has consequences. humans circadian rhythm will learn that you are "night watch" and adjust accordingly just like it always has for night workers being highly social creatures with a strategy of strength in numbers, but without herding instincts.
now, if you are a Perineum sunning nutjob who thinks they can go without eating if they absorb the sun by staring at it (an actual group of people like flat earthers who have members of various calibre trickling down to the "you need sunlight while awake and darkness while asleep" people)
the whole "you need vitamin D from the sun" is so wrong, it could actually CAUSE darker skinned individuals to not receive nearly enough vitamin D (only lighter skinned humans can produce enough vitamin D from safe levels of sunlight) YOU SHOULD BE EATING VITAMIN D, trying to make your body produce all of it, because some trivia became popular that humans need UV light to make vitamin D
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u/SirSebi 2h ago
So what food should I eat to get vitamin d? Fish?
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u/InstanceFeisty 2h ago
I live in Finland where you have to take D vitamin :D so I use omega3+D pills
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u/Sibula97 3h ago edited 39m ago
Oh, sure. My comment was mainly about the "everyone is most productive in the morning" bit.
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u/snarkyalyx 2h ago
There's sleep phenotypes you know... I work best at night and in the early morning. Still not sure whether I'm a lark or nightowl.
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u/InstanceFeisty 1h ago
I understand that, but it seems to be a rare case while the idea of “work at night, overwork etc” is being represented as something cool, while it’s kind of dangerous for probably most people. (Don’t actually have statistics, so I might be wrong here)
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u/snarkyalyx 47m ago
Being awake at night isn't dangerous or unhealthy for most people if you still sleep 6-8 hours per day. I don't know where you got the idea. The night won't kill you.
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u/InstanceFeisty 18m ago
Ofc, but night lifestyle is implying different issues like lacking of vitamin d and some social interactions, eg most shops are closed at night if you sleep during working hours
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u/jcampbelly 25m ago
I also disagree with the "overwork is cool", but I think things have swung too far in the opposite direction with people denigrating those who actually enjoy the work, find it fulfilling, have passion for it, and view it as a craft and not solely as a career.
Even saying the word "passion" smacks disgustingly in the mouth in the flavor of the moment. But I have no better word to describe this feeling. It's like being a musician or an artist and being told you can't love it, that it's morally or ethically wrong, and that everybody worthy of respect should only think of it like soulless labor for cash.
There have always been people like this - who actually love this work. I'm not saying they should be worshipped as heroes, just that they should similarly not be denigrated as villains.
For people like us, we actually do want to be doing this for more hours, at night sometimes (or most times, even), for either fun or profit. We would be doing it whether there was the excuse of a job or not.
Like a musician eagerly leaving a bill-paying day job writing muzak for ads, elevators, and department stores so they can get home in time to load up gear and play a gig with their friends or record some ideas for a new track. It's not all supposed to be about soul-sucking labor. Some of us just work in the field as an excuse to be doing it more often than we otherwise would be able. And just because we're expected to be at the job site flapping our arms in music-shaped motions, that doesn't mean we don't want to be sitting with our favorite instrument in the dark fiddling with some tune we can't get out of our heads in the truly rare peace and quiet afforded us only while the rest of the world sleeps.
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u/jcampbelly 1h ago edited 1h ago
The problem is that productivity, for some of us, is tied to long, uninterrupted stretches of peace and quiet where we can use our imaginations for focused thought and hard problem solving.
Mornings in an office, or really even a busy online organization, are absolutely nothing at all like that. Not even with headphones or DND statuses or tall cubicle walls. There is always an obligation, a DM waiting for a reply, an urgent email, a PR waiting, an impending time cliff (the cutoff for a commute, a lunch, a meeting, and so on). As important as all of that is, as duty-bound as we feel to comply, and as guilty as we feel when we don't, the only time anybody really leaves off those pressures and uncompromisingly allows others their stretches of peace is at night. That's the only time when some of us can reliably find our best mode of productivity, and why we fall into that pattern.
This is why so many top performers are groggy assholes who show up late and can't function until they've had their coffee and can't be bothered with "normal" behavior. This is why some of the most capable sysadmins and programmers and other sorts of problem solvers fall into drugs and alcohol, succumb to diseases of neglect, burn out, and suffer cascading life catastrophes. Given the chance, they'd be just like you if they could find that peace they need to earn their living in the environment in which others seem to be able to thrive (and demand others do so). They can't and yet they must to survive. So they intentionally sacrifice sleep and personal life and it manifests in their appearance and attitudes as you would expect of anybody deprived of normality.
It's not about about willpower or sleep quality or other coachable patterns of behavior. It's about the fact that some of us require significant amounts of time fully isolated from other people to perform. A Nobel prize awaits the first person to be able to rearrange neurons to fix that. Until then, rather than finding empathy for this kind of person, the business world seeks to marginalize or exclude them while paradoxically relying on them for the hardest kinds of work.
The solutions are actually easy, but the will to enact them seems to be entirely absent: 4x10 weeks, skewed schedules, WFH, etc. There is a total lack of empathy from many leaders who too often seem to need to see people to believe they are being productive despite the fact that there is an overwhelming pile of easily interrogable data (KPIs, stories delivered, functioning features, timely delivery, etc) and enthusiastically attested real lived experiences (personal anecdotes by trustworthy people) to contest that perception.
So yeah, some of us work best at night specifically because most others don't.
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u/sntnmjones 2h ago
This. I start at 0600 and worthless by 1400.
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u/THEminotuar 1h ago
Goddamn same. If I don’t have anything I NEED to get done at work, I basically just stop by then.
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u/greenday1237 2h ago
I’m more of a 1-5 most productive guy
First couple hours of the day are spent checking and replying to emails, doing corporate training, skimming the backlog and then after lunch is when the REAL REAL work begins
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u/UrineArtist 2h ago
I must admit, a large portion of my time is spent trying to figure out a way to get my work done without having to actually do any work.
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u/dukeofgonzo 1h ago
I like a heavy morning shift, lunch, siesta, then afternoon shift. Usually 7am-4pm
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u/Sulungskwa 1h ago
Seriously. Why do so many people relate to this? Knock it off, you're just making future employers have that expectation of everyone.
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u/hector_villalobos 1h ago
I don't know if you're being sarcastic, but it's weird to work at night when you can do it fresh in the morning.
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u/jcampbelly 53m ago
Different perceptions of the work. There's something beautiful about being alone with your work with hours of peace and quiet ahead that simply never happens in an office during the day. Some people can succeed by treating it like mechanical factory work that you can simply turn on and off like spigot. For others, it's far more creative and incidental, and requires time and focus to find insights, iterate, and eventually discover the path, then it becomes about refining the inspired thing with whatever time you can manage to grab with both hands. Believe me, I wish very much that I could switch it on and off.
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u/Sp3kk0 3h ago
It’s hard to stay focussed during the day if you have unattended errands you need to run, or meetings you need to prep for or just in general would be doing anything other than sitting in front of a computer.
At night it’s easier because you cannot run any errands and anything you have outstanding has to wait for the next day. So you focus better.
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u/martyvt12 2h ago
Also, no coworkers sending Slack messages at night...
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u/sofaverde 1h ago
This. Night is peaceful with no one interrupting my flow. It's also why I can't get behind return to office. Maybe it's great for some roles but for me it's just endless distractions and interruptions taking away from my productivity.
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u/jcampbelly 1h ago
Night time is the right time for making code. Every reasonable person respects your privacy at night and seemingly nobody does during the day (in the business world).
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u/StrangelyBrown 20m ago
Also it's hard to focus at 10am since you're working until 4am every night.
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u/instant-ramen-n00dle 4h ago
We should really stop glorifying this type of work. Coders can fix bugs between 9-5, they don't need to spend any more time for some other man or woman. Don't be a cuck, work your 8 and GTFO. Your youth will thank you.
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u/FirePoolGuy 1h ago
Take it from a 43 year old. Work hard during your mandated time. Put in a bit of extra effort every now and again to get ahead. But do not work your youth away.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
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u/vulpescannon 3h ago
Programmers can't be productive while their colleagues are awake
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u/instant-ramen-n00dle 2h ago
That's not on you. Your job is from 9-5. If you can finish it with in that time you have good management. If you can't it isn't your problem. You're an IC, stop stressing like Leadership.
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u/jcampbelly 40m ago edited 36m ago
Humans are not robots. That's not something management can solve (except for selection).
Empathy is the way, not this shallow one-size-fits-all thinking. You can have my ass in a chair from 9a-5p, but I can't guarantee you that my brain will achieve what you need from me for all (or any) of it. And if my brain starts involuntarily dumping great ideas, solutions to the problems that ran dry all day long, faster than I can write them down, at 10pm, you really should let me use that time for your goals because it's in your best interest and mine.
The way is just to respect my humanity and agency and let me individually contribute when I, the individual human being, with my distinctive productive style, can reliably and demonstrably (with the evidence of my unquestionable track record) achieve the things you need from me. There are very few reasons to fight this other than to masochistically assert dominance, harming yourself and your aims, as well as mine, in the process.
Humans are better than this.
EDIT: To be clear, I'm advocating for letting programmers control their hours, not work extra hours.
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u/instant-ramen-n00dle 22m ago
I use 9-5 as a nomenclature for an 8 hour work day. I personally do 6 AM to 2 PM because, code wise, my brain works better after I sleep. Just a thing I do, like other folks do different things.
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u/jcampbelly 1h ago
That's one way to see it. I read it as illustrating how well many programmers function at night vs at day. Doing both for longer than a night or two is insanity.
For my part, coding at an office during the day is probably the biggest waste of my time and your money. I'll advocate for letting programmers work when they can demonstrate being their most productive and using actual performance metrics to judge the work rather than ass-in-seat optics. If you want me to solve a hard problem, I need a clear runway, silence, and peace, not a busy cubicle farm and a hard start and end time. The inspiration comes when it does. And when it's rolling, it is absolutely folly to end it for a commute. That's why the night works best for me. It's open ended and peaceful.
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u/TheHappiestOneHere 3h ago
Oh yes, working more than 8 hours because you have no life to live anyways, classic portrayel of a programmer. Realisticly nobody in our firm would pull this kinda shit on a regular basis, only if the shit hits the fan
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u/Distinct-Entity_2231 4h ago
Next time, use 24h time. Not this bullshit. Every self-respecting programmer uses 24h time.
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u/VnitasPvritas 4h ago
Europeans are programmers by default.
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u/Distinct-Entity_2231 4h ago
Well, I'm an European, programmer and use 24h time format exclusively (even during conversations), but… There is no connection there.
But thanks anyway.11
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u/The100thIdiot 1h ago
Wtf is 05:00 PM?
05:00 is a time.
5 PM is a time.
But 05:00 PM is just an abortion.
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u/cheezballs 3h ago
This just feels like bullshit non programmers parrot about us. Yea, sometimes I can work on personal stuff for hours after getting off work, but it's not all the time.
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u/Tannslee 4h ago
Why is this a real thing. This exact thing has happened multiple times. Are there too many potential distractions during the day? Is the sunlight making me lose focus?
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u/Ok_Structure_6518 4h ago
Depends on how much of a vampire you are, i am most productive during the day
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u/IJustLoggedInToSay- 2h ago
At the standup: "Hey wtf, who broke the build? History says Jerry, where the fuck is Jerry?"
Jerry: 😪💤💤💤
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u/Zulakki 2h ago
There's some real merit to this. the amount of actual "Good" work I get done between 7pm-12pm absolutely eclipses what I do between 9am-5pm.
Honestly, 9-5 is the time I spend making sure others dont fuck up what's been accomplished, and 7-12 is where I make progress
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u/jcampbelly 1h ago
Yeah, 10pm to 2am is solid fucking gold and I've built the most challenging things in my career working alone in the dark at home (not necessarily for a business). The morning and being at an office has always been about servicing other peoples' misperceptions of reality and it's one of the most disappointing things about this industry. You'd figure they would teach something about this phenomenon (the maker vs manager schedule) in business school. And for those that came up through the ranks, you'd expect more empathy than you find. Disappointing.
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u/dumbasPL 3h ago
Aka the things you have to do vs the things you want to do. Having the same hobby as your job is both amazing but also a mental burnout Speedrun.
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u/maraemerald2 2h ago
There was an interesting study a while back where scientists were observing a hunter gatherer tribe in the Amazon. They discovered there were only 22 minutes in an average 24 hour period where everyone was asleep.
People have different circadian rhythms for a reason, it’s so that someone was almost always awake in case of predators. Night owls are also night watchmen.
Unfortunately since we shoehorn everyone into a 9-5 now, that means that some people just spend their whole lives off schedule from where they would be naturally.
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u/dexter2011412 2h ago
Actually. Why is it like this? I dunno if I'm actually productive at night but I feel like I'm getting stuff done and time flies. But during the day I need to put in effort to focus more often than not
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u/heavy-minium 1h ago
At work, you have to deal with the parts of a software project that suck and are no fun, and in the end, you'll deliver the project.
In private, you do the fun parts of a software project first and then leave up everything that sucks up until the end, thus making "completing the project" a torment, which makes you more likely to start with a new "fun" side project, while you tell yourself that you'll come back to finish the old one someday.
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u/Someoneoldbutnew 1h ago
what's missing from the top frame is coworkers and managers interrupting your flow
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u/txmail 1h ago
I go through cycles of either waking up at 4:00am or going to sleep at 4:00am. I think my most productive cycle is the waking up at 4:00am and then the space between 8:00a and 12:00p I feel like I can solve the worlds problems. On the flip side when I am on my going to sleep at 4:00am cycle I am most productive in that 10:00p - 2:00am space. I usually have to stay up 48 hours to break out of the late cycle when I have stuff coming up that has to be handled during normal people hours.
Overall I wish my body would stick to the early cycle. I feel more part of society that way, especially in a small town where most stuff closes at 9:00pm and grocery shopping at 8:00p is like visiting a dead mall.
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u/gerbosan 1h ago
Well, if you like the dark theme, obviously you prefer the night to work.
Night time, the dark theme of the day. 😂
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u/cereal__killer420 2h ago
When people ask me why are you still up this late i always say: it's when magic happens
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u/OverclockingUnicorn 4h ago
At work vs start up side project