This is not sustainable, and not healthy. You're doing damage to your body that you won't have to deal with for some time but will come back to haunt you. This degree of work makes me wonder what your lack of concentration at times does in terms of code quality, security, ingenuity, etc... Working more does not translate into better work.
I've been in this game since '81 and when I talk to other "old people" we all seem to agree that the hardest technical challenges were solved out on the trail, over a beer with fellow programmers, while lifting weights, while posting to HN, while playing games with the kids... while younger people automatically assume the only way to work on a problem is by sitting in front of a screen while typing as fast as possible.
This does not only apply to problems that are knowledge/skill limited. Error rates explode on grunt manual labor beyond a certain number of hours. Ops suggestions probably do help increase the number of hours slightly, but almost certainly not to 100+ hours or whatever op is claiming. If you're just going to have to redo all the work tomorrow morning, or are too sleepy to see a way to turn 10 hours of grunt labor into 30 seconds of automation, then stop anyway because you probably will have a better faster idea tomorrow.
Eye patches to reduce the headaches, wrist braces to help with the pain, etc...
It's probably best to avoid getting to this situation. At some point years from now, your body won't be happy if this continues.
In addition to a little more rest, you might want to take 10 of those hours a week and add a little voice recognition, for example, into your tool chest:
Agreed. And just to be clear, I'm not suggesting anyone should program this much. But I think some people are forced into this situation, especially in certain settings. My goal with this post is to provide a list of things that might help alleviate side effects.
My engineering advice is your complicated solutions to avoiding the results of screen glare and the results of background noise would be to clean up at the source rather than at the symptoms. Don't require exotic vision hacks to work around screen glare if you invest in good lighting and top quality matte screens, don't require special comfy headphones if you're in a good (quiet?) acoustic environment. If your environment sucks, change it don't adapt to it
You do correctly implement that strategy with posture and the chair, I've met many people thrilled to spend tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours on chiropractic and back pain therapy just to avoid spending hundreds of dollars on a really good chair and hours working on posture, meditation, tai chi type stuff and/or stretching.
Can it be put as, a list of ways to counter the signals that your body is trying to tell you to stop? I think survival would mean that you aren't killing yourself. While reading this, I kept asking myself if a medical doctor would agree with you. I think that it would take quite a bit of effort to find one that does.
I am not a medical doctor, nor do I make any claims to be. I have simply found a few things that work in a specific case and am sharing them in hopes that others in similar situations might benefit.
Maybe some of us aren't cut out for it? There are definitely weeks when I spend almost 80 hours at my home office computer. My family doesn't really like these periods, but I rarely get headaches and have never experienced joint pain. (I'm almost 40)
I really hate to walk away when I'm on a roll, my mind is really in the moment and has a list of to-dos that is 100 items long. If they are floating around in my head, it does interfere with sleep. I keep graph-paper notebooks with sewn bindings, which have a bit of permanence, and pick up a pen and get them out of my mind so I can close the day.
Nice one. I love those "least of your problems" quips. For anyone who thinks this person is probably wrong, here's some reading for what it's like to not be able to type:
This is insane, I am under the impression my best work is done in 2h max bursts when my other necessities (physical, social and intellectual) are somewhat fulfilled.
The long hours are a necessity if on a tight schedule, but working long hours is very very different from being productive. And of course, as everyone else is probably saying in this thread, this is not sustainable, not without serious health impact AND a greatly reduced work quality.
I think that this type of excessive 'hero' attitude is not without risks mostly to your overall mental health. Also, no mention is made of physical exercise ... I am worried for you lil' fella ...
Sorry, I really didn't mean for this post to come off how a lot of people seem to be taking it. I just figured there might be other people out there who run into the same issues I do, so I figured I'd share what has helped me.
I make sure to exercise every day: bike + swim + p90x occasionally. I think that exercise is just as important as the rest of what I'm talking about here, I suppose I should have gone into more depth on that in the post.
I think early in your career as a programmer you spend a lot of time researching, and then as you gain more experience and learn more about the languages, tools, etc. you're working with you end up spending more time writing code and less having to read S.O. answers :)
Actually, unless you are working on your own, you will find as you get more experienced, you will be spending more time on tasks other than coding, such as design, mentoring, etc...
I think that the parent is actually referring to design time.
I find as I grow older that I program in short bursts. I spend quite a bit of time thinking about what I want to do. I scribble a couple of diagrams on paper to make sure that the image I have in my head is complete and once I'm sure of what I want to do and why, only then, I start typing.
Usually, those first scribbles end up being my test cases.
As for the original article, if I had to use as much gear as he does just to get by, I would really rethink my life.
I've been creating software now for almost 25 years and I find that the amount I type has definitely decreased over that time.
Developing good, maintainable, correctly abstracted software should need more design/thinking time than actually implementing/typing it.
You can't. Eventually it will do you in. When I was 29 I spent 4.5 months coding 100 per week and once we shipped I wound up in the hospital. Never again.
I've been doing this for 11 months and still going strong. I'm still getting a reasonable amount of sleep every night (about 6 hours) which I'm sure helps, and I make sure to recover when I need to.
I seriously believe that you have the wrong attitude here. You should be looking to reduce the amount of hours and instead focus on decent, solid and productive hours.
There is no way you can be at 100% after 11 months of 80 hour weeks.
Falling asleep in less than 10 minutes is a strong sign that you have a chronic sleep deficit.
A chronic sleep deficit significantly impacts your mental abilities. So in other words, you may be working long hours, but they are very likely to be much less effective hours than if you were getting a proper night's sleep every night.
Your entire post reads like satire, but I don't think that was your intent. You're fall prey to the illusion of progress, the belief that by doing silly life-hacks and pushing yourself, you're increasing your productivity. That might be partially true in the (very) short, but enough research has been done to verify that all you're doing in extreme harm to your body and mind, and you're setting yourself up for a major burnout.
Hmm, I'm not sure about that NIH writeup. I personally am not sleep deprived, but I am able to fall asleep within minutes (5 +/- a couple) of my head hitting my pillow.
I wake up at the same time every day, and go to bed at the same time every night. Basically, I start getting tired when I'm getting near my 'bed time' and I use that as a cue to go to bed. Since I'm very regular with my routine, I rarely have any sleep issues, and I get around 8 hours of sleep per night. If I'm sick or something, I might get tired in the afternoon and want a nap, but that's fairly rare.
That said, I totally agree that his post screams of shortsightedness, and in fact, seems like satire in order to call people out for their abysmal work habits. It's too bad, but based on his comments, it seem he feels forced into this. Hopefully once his startup is fully started, he'll be more healthy.
Yes, it's a strong sign that you're chronically over tired, but it's not proof. I also fall asleep in less than 10 minutes. I "learned" this skill during a time period when I was chronically over tired, though. Any sort of stimulant use (caffeine, late night sunshine, et cetera) disrupts it.
...I have to keep cranking until bugs are fixed, features are out or demos are ready.
No you don't. You could just take longer to build the features, or share the coding jobs with someone else, or cut something that's not really necessary. No one has to do 60+ hours of coding a week.
Just want to clear up a few things, since this is getting more attention that I thought it would.
1) I am not saying you should do this. I code this much because I'm a co-founder of a pre-funding startup and am working hard to get my company off the ground, and because I enjoy coding.
2) Programming 80+ hours a week is absolutely insane. I'm not saying I'm anything special because I do it or that people who do it are anything less. I'm just another SV entrepreneur working hard to turn an idea into a company.
3) I wrote this post for other founders like me who are in worse shape than I in hopes that some of the things in here might help them.
If I was in your shoes, I would try to optimize my output instead of optimizing the hours behind my computer. Think about it.
You say you still have time to do research, so do some research on working 40+ hours for more than 1 month. With your 80+ hours/week for 11 months, your productivity has turned way negative compared to doing half of those hours.
Let me put this in other words: If you had worked the past 11 months at 40 hours a week, you would have produced more than the 11 months you did now on your insane 80+/week.
Take a day off, get some good night sleep, read this again, and think about it. Don't believe me? Do some research.
I was expecting the same.. read to the end.. nothing. Jesus, that is not healthy. Maybe he should try going outside and socialising instead, the boost to productivity will more than negate the time "lost".
alright, I just got the thought when reading about elbow protectors.
I would caution with giving advice for taking vitamins and other supplements as a non-MD. Medical advice based on a sample size of N=1 is not a good idea. Apart from clear harmful vitamin deficiencies, studies show mixed results on the benefits of vitamins supplements.
I find it sad how much our industry obsesses about working crazy-long hours. It's a hard thing to criticize, since I think most of us (myself included) have found ourselves passionately working on a project non-stop for extended periods of time, and found it fulfilling. But I worry about the mythologizing that happens where we take this behavior as a source of pride, either to make heroes of the famous programmers who locked themselves in their room for a week with Red Bull and pizza and, or use this as a status symbol to brag about how awesome a hacker we are.
Who am I to tell someone to stop working if they choose to do so? But I do worry that this just normalizes expectations by companies that every dev needs to be a rockstar ninja 10x hacker that lives and breathes code 24/7 and has no life outside the company.
I guess what I think is that when we see things like "working 80-hour weeks continually" we shouldn't be defaulting to "wow that's so impressive!" but rather "wow that's not healthy."
This should not be advocated, surely. 40 hours alone is too long for most people to be sat in front of a monitor, let alone double that. There should tips on how to avoid this.
And, for those of us who do not partake in this craziness, you're no less of a programmer. In fact, you're probably thinking straighter (not saying that the author isn't compared to most, but you're surely more alert).
I actually gave a talk (https://james-brooks.uk/staffs-web-meetup-video/) entitled "Programming is Awesome", where I spoke about dealing with anxiety and depression as a programmer. You're probably in need of some words like this if you're near to this...
Maybe if you had started programming at an earlier age like I did (instead of playing hide and seek with your friends), your wrist bones would have evolved a natural keyboard-optimized curvature and you wouldn't need wrist braces...
So you only sleep 5 to 6 hours each night, and program 80+ hours a week? You probably think you are maximizing your productivity, but actually you aren't. You are losing obvious creative solutions and spend a lot of time fixing stupid things you broke.
You are working in an unsustainable way, both mentally and physically.
Do you have a fellow programmer in the same code base who does normal hours? If so, what does he think about your code and delivery rate? If not, let someone else (and smart) look at your code and productivity, and get some objective feedback on it.
Wearing wrist braces while typing can actually increase injury. They should be worn when not working, especially during sleep, because a large fraction of RSI injury is accumulated by a number of people that exhibit nocturnal contracture during sleep (drawing of hands to chest centerline, bending and curling of the wrists and fingers also). Also, light strength training is often very helpful.
I went through RSI in my early 20's (while writing a research compiler), did a ton of research and have been symptom free for two decades.
Wearing headphones for prolonged hours is not healthy, especially the type that cover all the ear. The ears need air circulation, otherwise there is a high risk of infection (as bacteria develop faster in closed, warm and wet spaces). The best thing is to agree with your colleagues to some common music theme (chill-out or something) and listen/accept/bear that as an increasing-productivity factor rather than something that you'd need to enjoy.
If any corporation were to ask this from me, I would sue them out of this world. Why do it to yourself as your own boss? Do 40h/w for double the time or hire someone to help you.
I really don't see the value in code written by someone after 80 hours. Its going to be crap compared to what they could have done in normal 40 hour weeks. Any manager who wants this code is a fool.
If you want your programmers to be more productive then keep the distractions to a minimum, give them sound proof offices, great meeting areas, and get them the hell out of the office after 40 hours (maybe 36).
Your value to a company is not only what you can do now, but what you can do in the future - If you get acute back ache, burn out and RSI in both paws - you'll be taken out back, like old yeller, and shot.
