Computer Programmers Only the 5th Most Sleep Deprived Profession 204
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: (Economists, Social Workers, Computer Programmers), Financial Analysts, Plant Operators (undefined, but we assume 'factory' and not 'Audrey II'), and Secretaries."
I wonder... (Score:5, Funny)
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Issue for me is pattern recognition. (Score:5, Interesting)
Course, I could just have the brain worms. Who knows.
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ver the years, I seem to have trained my brain to seek out patterns in everything I encounter.
How has this benefited you in life?
(Not a troll- honestly curious)
I've trained myself to recognize patterns where it's applicable - but doing it everywhere/with everything seems like a waste of brain cycles.
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Hard to say, its a difficult thing to quantify. I do a LOT of data analysis in my programming work, so its either a benefit or a side effect. However I could do without my mind shouting "WHAT'S THAT MEAN!" when someone three rooms away whispers...
It's serotonin related anxiety. I had that for 30 years, and thought it was normal. If you want to get rid of it, an SSRI will work wonders. But then, of course, you have to weigh the side effects against the benefits. BTW, I thought I'd be less productive without that, but I find just the opposite.
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Popping pills is not necessary but in the most severe cases. I get this too as a software developer with a mentally demanding job, it is essentially overstimulation.
Try reading up on Zen as well as meditation techniques. Practice breathing exercises. Decrease sugars and processed foods heavy in complex carbs. Take up full body exercise that is demanding but not stressful. Do not run or lift weights, it is too stressful on your body. Walking, tai-chi and yoga help. All of this balances me out and calm
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>Do not run or lift weights, it is too stressful on your body
Nonsense. Humans are highly evolved for running. And for heavy physical activity in general, if not exactly weight lifting.
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. . . doing it everywhere/with everything seems like a waste . . .
. . . but it's a fun waste . . .
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Re:Issue for me is pattern recognition. (Score:5, Interesting)
You mean I'm not the only one? Although in my case, I created a repeating track of ocean sounds.
The critical part of doing that, is that you have to make the track long enough that your brain doesn't detect the repeating pattern. My first attempt made it only 5 minutes long, and in surprisingly short order, I was going, "Okay here comes that particular crash of waves against the rocks..."
You also have to do something to deal with the start and end. I used audacity to add a 3 second fade in and out, at the start and end respectively. Then use an mp3 player that features a crossfade between tracks. and one-track repeat.
Oh, and then you take your speakers and put them on your window sill, pointing outside. The sound reflects back from the window and it sounds (somewhat) as if it's originating from outside.
Is there a hyphen in obsessive compulsive disorder? >.>
Re:Issue for me is pattern recognition. (Score:5, Funny)
Is there a hyphen in obsessive compulsive disorder? >.>
You should go check.... three times.
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If you really have CDO, you spell it CDO.
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YEE HAW! *bang bang*
One Two Three Four!
YEE HAW!! *bang bang*
One Two Three Four!
YEE HAW!! *bang bang*
One Two Three Four!
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A hyphen would probably be more correct. An en dash is used for ranges of numbers, and for showing relationships between two otherwise unrelated things, e.g. the Apple–Microsoft rivalry, the Epstein–Barr wedding, etc. Neither of those two rules appears to apply here.
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I can totally relate to this. I have to sleep with a fan or some other true white noise in the background. HAVE to. Absolutely have to.
My (ex-)wife bought or was given this noise generator thingy because we had problems sleeping with snoring and TV and such, and when I say "we" I mean that I had a problem sleeping, and she had a problem not turning off the TV when it was time to go to sleep. Anyway, it had a bunch of audio modes to pick from: birds, happy burbling river noise, jungle, crickets, a few ot
Re:Issue for me is pattern recognition. (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps somebody can explain to me why the notion that "a bunch of external noises keeps people awake" seems to be such a fucking revelation to slashdot readers?
I mean... how is this even a thing? News flash: LOUD (relative to ambient) NOISES WHILE YOU TRY TO SLEEP TENDS TO WAKE YOU UP. It doesn't mean your brain is "super extra powerful" or that you're "super mega ultra sensitive to patterns as a result of your intense brainpower."
It means that:
1) You probably have atrocious sleep hygiene, and don't reserve the bed for sleeping and fucking;
2) You probably sit up until very late with an LCD screen shining in your face, playing games, watching porn, watching movies or tv shows, etc., the result being that you arrive at bedtime in a fairly excited, wide awake, "daylight" mindframe;
3) You probably don't give yourself a reasonable amount of time to sleep - i.e., going to bed at 1 am, knowing you have to wake up a 6:30;
4) You are probably fairly sedentary, a bit overweight, and suffer from mild sleep apnea which disrupts your sleep patterns;
Fix those, then let's talk about how you all have a special secret ability that only engineers of your massive intellect and vast mental capacity could attain.
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Re:Issue for me is pattern recognition. (Score:5, Funny)
Hmmmm... ... maybe you can't sleep because you stay up all night trying to perfect looping ocean sound tracks.
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" track long enough that your brain doesn't detect the repeating pattern."
the brain will put a perceived pattern there, if there isn't a real one. Because if you don't have a pattern, you will go crazy.
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i always put on audio books as background sound. I just listen to the story until i fall asleep and pick up where i fell asleep the next night, i might take some people a while to get used to it but when a audio book is 18 hours long you will probably fall asleep before the book ends and know i can sleep thorough people talking or anything else pretty much. i started doing this when i moved to a house that was near a lumber mill, and two sets of train tracks. the trains would go by 60 a day mostly at night.
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Is there a hyphen in obsessive compulsive disorder? >.>
Remember, if you have it bad enough it's not OCD but CDO. ;-)
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What does Collaborative Data Objects has to do with it?
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I am particularly fond of Rainy Mood [rainymood.com]. The track is something like an hour long so repetition is a non issue. I will sometimes simulate "rainy days" by drawing the shades, putting on Rainy Mood, and then adding some music on top of that and doing some light reading. It is truly fantastic.
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You may find use for this:
http://www.simplynoise.com/ [simplynoise.com]
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So do you have the inverse problem now that when you're in a meeting and the background noise of the ventilation system comes on, you nod off?
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a good white noise generator that operates on the same frequency patterns as speech.
You'll know you're really in trouble when you start hearing whispering voices in the white noise. [wikipedia.org]
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I often hear "music" in machine noises e.g. dishwashers, central heating systems, washing machines, car engines.
My brain fills in these wonderful rhythms, harmonies and melodies. I try to remember them, but when I stop listening to the machines, they go, almost instantly.
The last time it happened a few weeks ago, I concentrated on it for many minutes, relaxed "decoupled" from the inhibitions part of my brain and let it compose. I consciously tried to remember the tune and ran to my guitar, picked it up and
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You're Bjork [youtube.com], right?
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No. When I was a young man, I was moderately amused by the humour I perceived in some of her solo stuff. But now I am an old curmudgeon.
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Didn't look at the clip. It was late, and Mrs Turgid would get suspicious if I started looking at Bjork videos... :-)
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Over the years, I seem to have trained my brain to seek out patterns in everything I encounter. This makes sleeping rough as any back ground noise resembling human speech causes me to become fully alert as my brain tries to make sense of what it heard. Only solution to this I've found is a good white noise generator that operates on the same frequency patterns as speech.
The opposite keeps me up: pattern construction.
When listening to white noise, I have had the experience of faintly hearing a particular song, which I assumed was just coming from some neighbor's house. After a while I realized that the song kept on going and going far longer than it should be.
I figured out that the song never ended because I didn't know how its arrangement ended. In other words, my brain was attenuating frequencies that did not fit the song as I knew it. I was literally hearing a
Re:Issue for me is pattern recognition. (Score:4, Informative)
Hope this doesn't bruise your ego, but everyone's brain is basically a giant pattern recognition device. Not everyone is tuned in to sound, though. I hear white noise (HVAC usually) as a rock band playing. Probably the distorted guitars and drums fit a similar spectrum. I have "transcribed" a few tunes, and they largely lack structure but don't match anything I or my friends recognize. Since I don't pay attention to lyrics in music, the vocals are usually nonsense syllables I can't make out.
An old episode of Radio Lab was investigating dreams, and one bit of info was that by having people play Tetris for a while before sleeping, they either thought about Tetris before sleeping, or reported dreaming about Tetris. The idea there was that it was part of the review/learning process.
I contest that and think that instead, since you were just doing Tetris pattern recognition, your brain is still in that mode while getting random input from your visual system. The first stage of sleep frequently being confused with being awake, it's hard to say for certain whether these people were actually dreaming, or awake and recognizing patterns, or really much of anything.
Mothers report being able to hear their child's cry in a crowded room - they are used to recognizing that pattern. Conclusion: stop listening to people, start listening to instrumental music, and you'll have a free radio in your head at all times.
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Well, the thing is that if your job involves pattern recognition for 40+ hours per week you're likely to be more susceptible to finding patterns in random noise than the average person.
And since programmers often spend a lot of time finding patterns in seemingly random data...
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Years ago an artist named Kit Williams buried an expensive jeweled rabbit and wrote a book, Masquerade, that hid clues to the whereabouts of the buried rabbit. Thousands of people pored over every bit of the book in minute detail looking for clues. The rabbit was eventually found, and the solution was clever and satisfying (unlike the many attempts in following years to duplicate the 'magic' of that book).
What I found especially interesting, however, was the documentary written afterwards. 'The Quest for th
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Over the years, I seem to have trained my brain to seek out patterns in everything I encounter. This makes sleeping rough as any back ground noise resembling human speech causes me to become fully alert as my brain tries to make sense of what it heard. Only solution to this I've found is a good white noise generator that operates on the same frequency patterns as speech.
I had that problem too, best thing i've found is to just get a small fan. Loud enough to drown out most background noise like conversations and walking yet not loud enough to keep you awake.
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Over the years, I seem to have trained my brain to seek out patterns in everything I encounter. .
You sure that was you training your brain? And not, say, a million years of evolution?
secretaries??? wonder who they are up late with... (Score:3, Funny)
secretaries??? wonder who they are up late with...
17 minutes? (Score:5, Funny)
Because we sleep 17 minutes less than Forestry workers? 17 lousy minutes? I sleep longer than that in crummy meetings.
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7 hours is sleep deprived? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:7 hours is sleep deprived? (Score:5, Interesting)
Looking at the most well rested and least, there's only a difference of like 4 minutes. Really, 4 minutes makes the difference between a good night's rest and being "sleep deprived?"
They don't show the standard deviation either, which could be huge.
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It's not science!
Re:7 hours is sleep deprived? (Score:5, Insightful)
...and they've not included professions where most people I know get almost no sleep. I'm a management consultant, and between the travel, work, and client outings, we consider ourselves lucky if we get 5 hours of sleep on a week day. And compared to my i-banking friends, I'm practically a lazy ass. Ditto for a lot of people in consulting (management or IT), finance, and law (I did see lawyer and financial analyst there, but those numbers look like a joke).
Re:7 hours is sleep deprived? (Score:4, Insightful)
And oh, I forgot: soldiers and people in the US military. Those folks have pretty brutal schedules, too.
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"Those folks have pretty brutal schedules, too.
You'd be surprised at how those are often managed.
Even in wartime, USAF aircraft maintainers are frequently rotated after twelve-hour shifts because performance deteriorates near that point. Units are manned accordingly. It is also encouraged to rest when not working for greater efficiency. Many deployers prefer that environment as far as work goes because there are few other demands beyond work, eating, and sleeping.
Likewise many Navy vessels are manned for 24
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Back when I travelled a lot doing sales support and also programming in the hotel rooms (sometimes all night), I got trained so that I would get on the airplane, sit down, buckle up and be asleep before we left the gate. Sometimes I woke up enough to tilt the seat back. I would wake up as we came in for a landing (each landing). I got at least 1/2 my total sleep that way, sometimes for six weeks at a time.
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If the standard deviation within a group is large, than the small differences between the groups is even less relevant. A small difference between groups is most relevant if the standard deviation within a group is small.
But yes, undoubtedly the standard deviation is large, which really means that none of the listed professions get a statistically significantly different amount of sleep than the others.
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Looking at the most well rested and least, there's only a difference of like 4 minutes. Really, 4 minutes makes the difference between a good night's rest and being "sleep deprived?"
@Missing.Matter Amen.
@PHCOsci Amen.
The conversation here should be more about " Useless Stats" than about who sleeps more or less.
Even more disturbing than the tiny difference or 4 mins, is the overall ~24 mins between the extremes on this list.
+agree with others about how this is a statistician FAIL. .. I don't know who is sleeping 5 to balance me, but thanks whomever you are.
+agree with others about uniqueness of humans.
I personally prefer about 9 hrs
@ACs and others talking ab
7h3m vs. 6h57m (Score:5, Informative)
I don't think that three minutes really makes that much of a difference between first and fifth place, when it represents less than one percent of the mean of those two points.
More surprising is that they think programmers get anywhere near 7 hours sleep a night: I average 5 Sunday to Friday, and 10 each on Friday and Saturday, for an average of 6h26m. In my youth, I got a LOT less (working 100 hour weeks was not unusual).
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Er, six minutes, and less rthan 2%. My bad.
Less sleep needed (Score:2)
Sound more like "less sleep needed" then "more sleep deprived", especially with only 23 minutes separating the most sleep from the least sleep.
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please quote correctly:
Demetrius: "Villain, what hast thou done?"
Aaron: "That which thou canst not undo."
Chiron: "Thou hast undone our mother."
Aaron: "Villain, I have done thy mother."
TA -IV-II
Also:
Painter: "Y'are a dog."
Apemantus: "Thy mother's of my generation. What's she, if I be a dog?"
ToA 1-1
If the taught period slang, and pointed out You're mama joke when try to teach Shakespeare in high school they would get a lot more interest,..cause it's Naughty.
Really now? (Score:3)
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As someone who's worked in Alaska... where's the fishing positions? All the crabbers?
Of course it might be hard to get sleeping stats for people who spend months out at sea. As Mike Rowe was once told by a crabber regarding safety, "OSHA??? No, Ocean!"
I'm sure we can assume they missed a lot of other occupations so I'd take this list with a grain of salt.
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In the military I would routinely go 72-104 hours with no sleep.
I don't think any other profession can top the military for sleep deprivation.
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I'm taking a class right now on a different post, thus stripping me of responsibility at my unit. I only work 8 hours a day, and only during the week. It's like I'm on vacation.
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Parents of young children are obviously more sleep deprived than any of the above.
Damn right, but it's a dangerous thing to point out on Slashdot. Any kid related post usually results in vitriolic "more fool you for having kids" replies.
thinking about stuff (Score:3)
I'm a programmer and I can't sleep because I'm thinking about stuff (bugs, better algos, etc).
Maybe this is a problem for authors or artists too.
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What I hate... I when I'm fixing all these bugs- typing furiously... I'm on a roll- finding solutions to all the corporate problems... and then I realise I'm really in that bizarre between wake-and-sleep stage and I'm not really fixing any bugs- or typing... I'm laying in my bed.
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Get up, write down a list of everything that's on you mind with solutions descriptions. Not code, just ideas.
Do it routinely. That will stop a large percentage of insomnia.
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More beer.
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I'm a programmer and I can't sleep because I'm thinking about stuff (bugs, better algos, etc).
Maybe this is a problem for authors or artists too.
Oh. I have actually found thinking about algorithms (and other engineering problems) a relaxing thing. It's the "counting sheep" for me.
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A chicken died to make a McNugget to provide the calories for that post.
The real story.... (Score:2)
line on economists (Score:2)
Personally, I would love to know why economists are on this list. Economists in academia, at least, seem to have flexible schedules that should let them get lots of sleep. Maybe a lot of them are grad students scrambling to publish, publish, publish. Or maybe there are a lot of folks like Larry Summers who prefer allocating more hours for work
I'm not going to lecture you on what an economist is and does (I could, I am one). But, I'd prefer if you just kept your prejudiced notions to yourself.
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You just sit around drinking coffee at starbucks discussing the Keynes with other economists don't you?
No wonder you can't sleep- too much caffeine. ;)
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I'm actually curious a to why that profession is on the list. Not trolling, just wondering. I had suspected you had an office job, read/write papers and do anylisys for whatever organization hired you. But I am surprised that it's so time consuming you can get 8 hours.
I know,l this whole post sounds like a troll, but I can't think of any other way to put it.
I get Cops, Dr.s factory workers. Office workers?
I woudl pout new parent towards the top of the list!
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I'm actually curious a to why that profession is on the list. Not trolling, just wondering. I had suspected you had an office job, read/write papers and do anylisys for whatever organization hired you. But I am surprised that it's so time consuming you can get 8 hours.
Well, as for the list, it's separating professions by the exact minute spent sleeping. Is there a difference between 6h1m and 6h10m of sleep? No...Her numbers are bizarre and her use of them all the more questionable.
Frankly, I don't believe the premise. People are people before they're economists, managers, programmers, engineers, or 'administrators'. What I've read suggests different people require different amounts of sleep to feel rested and those differences are biologically based. I'll leave it for a
Programmer who doesn't sleep (Score:2)
I'm a programmer and I probably get 8 hours sleep... over a three-day period.
Got nothing to do with my job. When I get off work- my work stays at work... I'm just a natural insomniac and would not be sleeping no matter what my job.
This has to be a joke. (Score:2, Troll)
If you're trying to tell me Doctors and Lawyers are more sleep-deprived than I am, you don't know shit.
Let's start with the fact that, as a computer programmer, I make a fraction of what they do - money is a frequent concern and often keeps me up figuring out finances or worrying. It must be tough to budget groceries, gas, and electric bills when you make $300k-$700k per year, right? Shit.
How about housing? I live in a tiny apartment downtown on my salary, while repaying loans, working a job at ~$30,000 a y
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This is about your profession, not your economic situation so you are being irrelevant. I no a lot of Drs that work 20 hours at a time.
And yes, the 'study; is ajoke.
You need to make a plan to get to a better place. Both career wise and location.
now, about Dr. Pay:
http://mdsalaries.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]
while more then you paltry sum, certainly not 300-700 K and mansion purchasing.
Also worth noting, Malpractice can cost from 4K to 85K depending on location and specialty.
How much insurance do you pay to code?
Depends
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I live in a tiny apartment downtown on my salary, while repaying loans, working a job at ~$30,000 a year.
That seems really low for a programmer, regardless of what part of the country you are in.
As a college drop out programmer that started off in IT making less than that doing third shift help desk, I was making more than $30k the first time my title was developer.
they are: (...) Plant Operators (Score:2)
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Dude... like... uh... I don't know what your getting at man.... dude... what? I need a brownie. Oh Yo Gabba Gabba is on.
Difficulty parsing (Score:2)
Averages mean NOTHING - only my experience matters (Score:2)
I don't match any of these averages, so the study is not just flawed and useless but completely misleading! I was up all night just thinking about what I was going to complain about on slashdot today and got less than 2 hours of sleep. These "researchers," if you can even call them that, have absolutely no f*ing idea how taxing it can be to be an internet gadfly.
Secretaries? (Score:2)
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How much do game developers skew the data? (Score:2)
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EA wasn't too bad for sleep as long as you could sleep on a couch or beanbag chair, desk chair, etc. (I think they even added beds or cots after I left) and didn't mind spending all other waking moments working. I actually didn't mind the normal schedule (10ish hours a day), it was just crunch time when my girlfriend at the time didn't see me for a month because I was at work 24 hours a day.
Actually, the front of the poll results don't surprise me at all. Doctors and Police Officers get crazy shifts (someti
Agnostic Dyslexics (Score:2)
I'm surprised dyslexic agnostics are not on the list.
Plant operator? (Score:2)
Slashdot Editors Must be Even More Sleep Deprived (Score:2)
Because if you actually read the chart in TFA, Programmers are 7th, not 5th.
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No, the problem is that they get too much sleep.
Maybe someday one of them will get up and actually show up to work. I'm doubtful, though.
Parent (Score:2)
The most sleep deprived profession is parenthood. The fact that taking care of kids isn't considered a 'job' is one of the great tragedies of our times. Without a doubt it is one of the most useful jobs for our societies, and one of the hardest. My experience with staying home and taking care of a child was that it was about 3x harder than a job (in IT). The second child was 2x harder again. And I get paid nothing (tax wise). The government would rather my child getting far inferior care in daycare - becaus
I'm not sleep-deprived (Score:2)
I'm alertness-challenged. :P
Any idea why (Score:3)
The fine summary lists a bunch of jobs with on-call requirements(health aides, nurses) then drops to computer programmers?
Wouldn't sysadmins and other operations personnel(network engineers, site reliability engineers, etc) be more likely to lose sleep?
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Some of the top paid gov employees in Massachusetts are cops - IIRC a few made more than the governor. A lot of this was overtime they picked up for sitting in a cop car with the lights on at construction zones (yes, in Massachusetts until recently ALL construction zones had to have a cop with the lights flashing, and all flaggers were cops). A year or two ago they managed to get a law passed allowing non-police to do some flagging.
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Did the construction company reimburse?
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I lol'd XD
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