Half of IT Workers Sleep on the Job

Stony Stevenson writes "According to a new online survey by Harris Interactive, more than half of IT workers say they've fallen asleep at work, while nearly half of techies also are apparently in the mood for love. Forty-seven percent of tech pros admit they've kissed a co-worker, according to the online survey of 5,700 U.S. workers, including 163 techies. The survey didn't indicate if those work taboos were committed by the same respondents, but in both cases, men were more likely to admit doing both. Forty-nine percent of male techies say they've fallen asleep at work, while only 35 percent of women admitted doing so."

Comments

zzzz......

[MaineCoon]

er, huh, whu? I'm sorry, were you saying something?

Re:zzzz......

[phantomfive]

No, I was too busy kissing my coworker. Too bad they are all male. I guess we do have a female office manager, she is the only one, but does that mean 47% of my coworkers have kissed her? Ew can we end this conversation already?

Re:zzzz......

[RuBLed]

setting threshold to +3

Re:zzzz......

[Stripe7]

Yes, falling asleep on the job is one half of the equation, working 12-18 hour days or being on call 24/7 is the other side of the equation. I was at EBay once and saw people with sleeping bags under their desks as well as watched a father singing a lullaby's to his kid over the phone because something blew up and work needed to be done.

Re:zzzz......

[driftingwalrus]

Clearly this points to an epidemic of sleep-kissing in the workplace!

Re:zzzz......

[Frosty Piss]

They got sleeping bags? Pussies.

Exactly. Ingrates. All we get where I work is a box or rocks, and I don't mean those smoothe river rocks, I'm talking those sharp crushed rocks. And we're not allowed to actually sleep n them, we can only look at them.

Re:zzzz......

[Anonymous Coward]

You get to use your imagination? Dear lord, I wish we could. All we get is a bunch of angry mole people that poke us with sharp pencils and hot pokers.

Re:zzzz......

[syntaxglitch]

In France, we often do work less than 40 hours a week. Less work also means better productivity. There surely is a "balancing point", but if it exist, it is different for every person, and is not constant with the time.

Believe it or not, there is actual research done on this--not that anyone ever pays attention to the results. If I recall correctly, it boils down to something like this:

- Productivity is low for the first 1-3 hours of a day as people get into the swing of things
- Daily productivity mostly goes up, but drops toward the end of the day (possibly because people are consciously "winding down")
- Productivity per worker hour peaks somewhere around a 30-hour week.
- Total sustainable productivity per week peaks at around a 45-hour week.
- Around 50 hours and up, fatigue builds up over time until burnout kicks in. Sustained work weeks of 50 hours are likely to be getting less TOTAL WORK done than sustained 35-hour weeks.
- Work weeks of around 80 hours are sustainable for maybe a week or so before catastrophic loss of total productivity occurs
- Anything much more than 80 hours likely results in immediately LOWER productivity, as fatigued workers make mistakes that take more time to fix than the extra hours provide.

From this, one can conclude that European schedules are more likely to maximize individual productivity (more work per hour), while American schedules are more likely to maximize organizational productivity (more work per person). One can also conclude that any manager who demands sustained work weeks of 50 hours or more is incompetent and a fool; the management equivalent of the kind of programmer who creates so many bugs he provides a net negative productivity to the team.

In practice, actual work hours are lower than they appear; most salaried workers are prone to finding numerous ways to not work while at work, largely because in many office environments physical presence is seen as more important than actual productivity.

I suspect the best balancing point would be something like four 9-hour workdays per week. Longer days to minimize the productivity drain of mornings, but a shorter total work week to allow occasional bursts of extra effort without creating long-term burnout.

Not always due to laziness or lack of work...

[dada21]

I have an older employee who handles some contracts (hourly) that has a tendency to fall asleep. He's within a decade or less of retirement, and we've caught him napping a few times in recent months (as has the customer he's usually working at). We've talked, and it definitely seems like there's a medical issue here, so it leaves us with having to just compensate the customer for any billable time where he has fallen asleep. We've considered moving him to an internal job, but he's really good at the tasks he leads, and he also works very hard otherwise. The customer is also understanding because they have realized that his productive time more than compensates for his napping time, but there's always a fear that the contract could expire over this particular issue.

I'm sure most of the people polled here are younger, but it's definitely not just a laziness issue.

Sounds like techies aren't getting enough sleep.

[Vellmont]

sleep debt is a real phenomenon, and if you're falling asleep at work, you've likely got a large amount of it.

Many people think falling asleep is a sign of "laziness". That's just nonsense, it just means that person needs to get more sleep, or get better quality sleep!

And 95% of management...

[jwiegley]

We're counting brain-dead as "asleep", right?

Sooooo....you ask a bunch of geeks

[gandhi_2]

You ask a bunch of geeks if they've kissed a co-worker...and no surprise, over half of them have! Of course, 57% of us are also blackbelts and monster-truck drivers in our spare time. The girls we supposedly kissed? Yeah, they're totally hot. But they live in Idaho, so you wouldn't know them.

Re:Sooooo....you ask a bunch of geeks

[nomadic]

You ask a bunch of geeks if they've kissed a co-worker...and no surprise, over half of them have! Of course, 57% of us are also blackbelts and monster-truck drivers in our spare time. The girls we supposedly kissed? Yeah, they're totally hot. But they live in Idaho, so you wouldn't know them.

You're all a bunch of liars who should be ashamed of yourselves. I, on the other hand, learned a little something called integrity and truthfulness back when I was going through astonaut training.

ahhh.. statistics...

[RuBLed]

Forty-seven percent of tech pros admit they've kissed a co-worker

Forty-nine percent of male techies say they've fallen asleep at work, while only 35 percent of women admitted doing so.

Here is the explanation: Since only 49% of the men admitted sleeping at work, the 51% must be up to something. 35% of the women admittend sleeping at work, my best guess is that at least 35% ( +/- 5%) of the men who were awake are kissing women who are sleeping. That leaves us with 16% of the male who were awake and not kissing sleeping women. Since 47% admitted kissing a co-worker (we already know that 35% we're males), it means that 12 % of the women we're kissing some of the sleeping men. (This doesn't surprise me). Now we had 16% innocent males and 51% innocent females, if you assume that 5% of the remaining males are on the top management, that roughly equals around 15% of the 51% women being kissed and not admitting it. 10% read slasdot (male obviously) leaving 1% what.. well we still had 36% of the women left...

Re:in your dreams

[weirdcrashingnoises]

Clearly this was a type-o. The correct statistic is that 47% of IT guys had a dream at work in which they kissed a co-worker.

Of those 47%, 15% admitted they didn't even know the name of the person who they kissed in their dream because they have never spoken a word to the member of the opposite sex. (with the exception of their mother)

25% admitted that they gotten close enough to see the secretaries name tag.

Finally, 60% admitted that they thought kissing the new company servers counted as kissing a co-worker.

Naps!

[kabdib]

As an Old Fart, I often take half hour naps in the early afternoon. I'm lucky to have worked mostly at companies with private offices (with doors that lock), but I've done this in cube farms, too.

After thirty minutes of down-time, I grab a cup of coffee and hit the afternoon refreshed, thinking clearly and less stressed.

Civilized societies have siestas.

Re:in your dreams

[CrazyJim1]

Actually, 35% of females have fallen asleep during the job.

And there the IT guy gets his chance.

Re:Working for a pr0n company & Powernapping

[megaditto]

Do you realise that unlike most of slashdotters, your boss expects you to alt-tab out of excel and into a pornsite when s/he is around?

Re:I Believe It

[aca_broj_1]

Shortly after I quit smoking, I realized the same thing. If you smoke regularly, you get the regular hourly ten minute break, once you stop, the breaks stop as well. It took me at least three months to realize that the reason I was less productive was not the post-quitting stress, but in actuality the lack of breaks. I have since started to take hourly breaks no matter what I do, and its made a world of difference.

Lies, damned lies, and Slashdot statistics

[MoxFulder]

According to a new online survey by Harris Interactive, more than half of IT workers say they've fallen asleep at work ... Forty-nine percent of male techies say they've fallen asleep at work, while only 35 percent of women admitted doing so. Hmmm... less than half of male techs have fallen asleep at work, and less than half of female techs have fallen asleep at work.

And yet, somehow, more than half of all techs have fallen asleep at work. Gosh, that's interesting. Those non-male non-female techs sure must do a lot of sleeping on the job!

Re:Lies, damned lies, and Slashdot statistics

[l0b0]

Didn't you get the memo? Sleeping transvestites are all the rage in the office these days.