>As a software engineer I've gone a whole week without sleep. And that was perfectly acceptable. My dad used to tell me, to consider myself lucky to even deserve the opportunity to go and work at a software company. Hence anything was acceptable.
Are you speaking metaphorically? or can you really perform under such conditions? I mean, I'm a SysAdmin, so a lot of my value is in my willingness to get up and fix something when my pager goes off at 4am; but I am very conscious of my declining productivity as I deprive myself of sleep. In fact I try to go to sleep before I'm absolutely exhausted for just this reason. The longest outages are always those that come right when I'm about to go to sleep.
It's not a matter of comfort or will; it's a matter of performance. Yes, I can make myself stay awake for several days, but I will make more mistakes. Way more mistakes. At some point, even in the middle of an outage, it makes sense to set an alarm for a few hours from now and take a nap, otherwise you just keep digging deeper. Staying up, sure, impresses the boss, but it doesn't get the job done any faster.
Are you speaking metaphorically? or can you really perform under such conditions? I mean, I'm a SysAdmin, so a lot of my value is in my willingness to get up and fix something when my pager goes off at 4am; but I am very conscious of my declining productivity as I deprive myself of sleep. In fact I try to go to sleep before I'm absolutely exhausted for just this reason. The longest outages are always those that come right when I'm about to go to sleep.
It's not a matter of comfort or will; it's a matter of performance. Yes, I can make myself stay awake for several days, but I will make more mistakes. Way more mistakes. At some point, even in the middle of an outage, it makes sense to set an alarm for a few hours from now and take a nap, otherwise you just keep digging deeper. Staying up, sure, impresses the boss, but it doesn't get the job done any faster.