I agree that we shouldn't be looking at it in terms of hours, but I don't know if it can be measured in terms of happiness (as the author seems to be indicating) either.
What are your goals? What is it going to take for you to achieve those goals? Will you be happy working towards those goals? Is the misery that you're going to have to endure to achieve those goals worth it? Can you sustain that level of misery and still accomplish your goals?
But, it could also mean that you’re just a lot dumber and less efficient than your peers who could do the same thing without pulling an all-nighter.
You may well be dumber than someone who doesn't need an all-nighter to do what you're doing, but you may want the prize you're working towards more than the person getting 8 hours of sleep - so go for it.
I have a kind of rule that has seen me from one place to another: you can always do it without an all-nighter. It might not have the best software engineering properties, it might suddenly do something completely different from all the rest of the code and drag in half a dozen libraries, it might barely fit the API you're calling.... but there is always some cleverer way of doing it than just coding all through the day and night.
Of course, many jobs actually want brute-force code versus library-laden, clever hacks. This is why I struggled to become a researcher again.
What are your goals? What is it going to take for you to achieve those goals? Will you be happy working towards those goals? Is the misery that you're going to have to endure to achieve those goals worth it? Can you sustain that level of misery and still accomplish your goals?
But, it could also mean that you’re just a lot dumber and less efficient than your peers who could do the same thing without pulling an all-nighter.
You may well be dumber than someone who doesn't need an all-nighter to do what you're doing, but you may want the prize you're working towards more than the person getting 8 hours of sleep - so go for it.