While hacker’s culture originates in contra-cultures of the 1960s, it was since then completely taken over by adolescents and the hacker’s culture can now be regarded as an adolescent culture. In accordance with this shift, demand for immediate gratification and focus on appearance has taken precedence over long-term thinking and depth of one’s knowledge. It seems to me that all-night heroic programming endeavors, programming with a hangover, or even drunk programming has become something to brag about and not something that should be avoided. The well known scene in the Social Network movie of drunk programming as part of job interview at early Facebook serves as a good case in point. While having fun at what one’s doing is very important, we should not forget that the outcome of programmer’s work should be code that efficiently solves the problem at hand and it’s easy to support in the future. The code pulled together in all-nighters is rarely efficient and almost never easy to support, so it’s usually best to send it to /dev/null and start coding from scratch once the person gets some decent sleep.
(the title is a quote by Jan Bervar from many years ago)
Computer Programmers Only the 5th Most Sleep Deprived Profession
garthsundem writes “As described in the NY Times Economix blog, the mattress chain Sleepy’s analyzed data from the National Health Interview Survey to find the ten most sleep deprived professions . In order, they are: Home Health Aides, Lawyer, Police Officers, Doctors/Paramedics, Tie:…
via: science.slashdot.org
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- Better Sleep Council Announces Campaign to End Sleep Deprivation (prweb.com)
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