Loss of sleep is cumulative. After 3 days, you might think you're getting by fine on 4 hours of sleep per night, but it's catching up to you. You start saying things that don't make sense, or pausing inexplicably during conversations. You start zoning out when reading, and make decisions based on habit rather than logic. Small inconveniences start making you angry, and complex problems are baffling. Organization becomes impossible. Your muscles are weak and uncoordinated, you bump into things like you're drunk. You'll begin to stop caring, you'll stop enjoying things. Over time, it just gets worse and worse, until you actually start hallucinating.
Adrenaline can get you through some difficult situations, but in the long run health problems will catch up to you.
I often spend 12-16 hours a day writing code (or, depending on where I'm at, putting pen to paper while I convince myself that the way I've found for solving a particular problem will work), but I don't rob myself of my 8 hours of sleep.
I've found from experience -- both while writing code and during my doctorate -- that the quality of work I produce when I'm sleep-deprived drops dramatically. If I'm lucky, I look at my work the next morning, decide that it's garbage, and throw it out; if I'm unlucky, I end up throwing out said sleep-deprived work a few days later, after spending many hours tracking down heisenbugs.
YMMV, of course -- some code is sufficiently straightforward that you can write it in your sleep, or (even better) has sufficiently explosive failure modes that you can test it in the morning and (assuming it doesn't explode) know that despite your lack of sleep, the code is good. And, of course, just as some people can code perfectly well while drunk or high on drugs, some people are entirely unaffected by not getting enough sleep.
But as for me and the code I write? I'll stay away from the drugs and make sure I get enough sleep, thanks.
This is romantic exaggeration. I would never advise founders to sleep less than they need, except in brief emergencies. Sleeping 8 hours a day leaves you 16 to work, and that should be more than enough.
Would that article make any more sense if it was about olympic athletes?
"I don't sleep, I train. How can I go to sleep when there's so much training to do? While my competitors are asleep and resting, I'm getting in an extra lap around the track. I'll sleep after I get a gold medal."
I can't count the number of times I stayed up late chasing a bug, only to have it be something so simple that I would've caught it in 20 minutes or less if I'd just gotten a normal amount of sleep and looked at it the next morning.
You just get slower and slower as you stay up, until you're sitting there staring at the screen for 5 minutes before you remember what you're doing.
Any lack of sleep at all will also cost you in productivity the next day. By having discipline to let it be, you can spend 20 minutes on it the next day instead of hours on it tonight and messing up your productivity all day tomorrow.
The hard part is realizing that quality is dropping as quantity increases. It may even be a small drop in quality, but if you add all of those drops up over time, it makes a big difference.
Sleep deprivation is terrible for productivity. Staying awake for 20hrs without sleep puts you in a mental state comparable to being over intoxicated over the legal limit.
If you want to stay awake for longer periods and retain mental acuteness, sleep polyphasically.
The stock illustration of the guy in the tie and the rah rah marketing tone of the site don't lead us to expect metaphors. You gotta warn us before throwing us a curve like that.
If you manage your time and life right, you shouldn't have to be sleep-deprived. Of course, that means you have to schedule your priorities, and some things won't make it as part of your life. I've gotten my Bachelor's and Master's, and I never had to pull an all-nighter beyond my first semester. I don't anticipate any all-nighters in the PhD program either.
One of the founders of the consulting firm that I worked for talked about never working past 6 or 7 PM. He never ate out, and spent that time working. You can always work more in your day without sacrificing your sleep and/or health.
At the same time, if we could all survive on less sleep, it'd be nice.
Even beyond lack of sleep, which I think we all agree is bad in the literal sense, the law of diminishing returns sets in at some point and makes working further counter productive. The exact amount, of course, depends on who you are and what exactly you're doing, but it's probably much far lower than most people would guess.
I've done a lot of research on this, through both reading and self-experimentation, and have come to the conclusion that there aren't very many people who would benefit from hacking more than 60 hours a week in short bursts, or more than 50 sustainably. I'd take a hacker who works hard 5 days a week, 10 hours a day, and spends the rest of his time partying over one who sits in front of a computer 12 hours a day, 7 days a week any time.
There's a wealth of information on the topic out there, and studies are published all of the time. It's definitely the sort of thing one should look into when trying to increase their efficiency.
keeping yourself sleep deprived is a false economy. you need sleep in order to function at your maximum level of productivity. it's better to function at 100% productivity 66% of the time than it is to function at 50% for 100% of the time.
exception to this is when you have a specific deadline that needs meeting and only way to get there is working through the night.
i really liked the article, it sets a good tone for the idea that the more you can push yourself the farther down field you get. I remember a quote from somewhere, I think it was in the Godfather,
"you have to be willing to do what the others wont."
If he was really that stingy and focused with his time he wouldn't have even wasted any to write that post. Anyone who has done non-trivial development knows that it is a marathon, not a sprint. Sleep is essential.
This might work. Over the course of high school, I had to stay up to do a lot of easy, but time-intensive work. This is, of course, diametrically different from coding.
An off-label prescription for Modafinil will let you skip as much sleep as you want and remain productive. You just have to start worrying about the cumulative health effects of minimal sleep. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modafinil
Adrenaline can get you through some difficult situations, but in the long run health problems will catch up to you.