Maybe it’s just the small subset of software engineers who frequent HN, but I swear 99.9% of the people on here are night owls, and they very much let their opinions be known on every thread about sleep.
Nearly everywhere in US society where productivity comes up, the “early bird” is held up as the standard of efficiency. Thus, those people who instead prefer a schedule that doesn’t begin pre-dawn have been chastised in books, talks, and in media despite there not being any proof that that they are “lazy” but rather are simply naturally attuned to a different schedule.
Interestingly, this early=virtue thing goes back more than a century. Before electric light, the common sleeping mode was in two chunks, first and second sleep. Moralizing busybodies, kin to the anti-alcohol movement, decided that second sleep was self-indulgent and unnecessary. The history podcast Backstory had a great set of segments on sleep a while back: https://www.backstoryradio.org/shows/on-the-clock-4/
Even as an early riser, I think the virtue part is horseshit. Not everybody has to be the same. Indeed, my (entirely unsupported) theory is that sleep schedule variation is natural and useful. In the wild, it's safer for everybody if somebody is always awake keeping an eye on things.
Perhaps because this is one place where kindred spirits feel comfortable sharing without fear of the denigration we've experienced our entire lives -- the overt and the subtle, conscious and inadvertent, the malicious and the good-intentioned.
Makes an amusing change from the percentage of people on LinkedIn who need to share morning rituals involving getting up at 4am to ensure they have time to read inspirational business stories, go to the gym, update their inbox over green tea and freshly baked bread and enjoy an hour of contemplative meditation before cycling to work to arrive before everybody else. :D
If the passive aggression from early birds weren't so intense, us night owls wouldn't have such a chip on our shoulder. But it is. Just look at the early birds in this thread: nearly every post equates their schedule to virtue.
It's refreshing to have a space that is welcoming of all sorts of circadian schedules instead of subtle shaming. But it's not just software engineers who decry the early risers - writers, artists, and PhD students constantly speak up about their need to stay up late in deep focus mode on a creative project. Maybe that's the common denominator - the need to be able to focus for hours without the disruption of emails or meetings.
I am an early-morning person and I am not feeling condescending towards you right now. Just slightly put off that you decided that all early-morning people have something against you.
