Computer Programmers Only the 5th Most Sleep Deprived Profession

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."

Comments

I wonder...

[hvm2hvm]

I wonder why the secretaries can't get any sleep... *wink* *wink*

Issue for me is pattern recognition.

[Kenja]

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.

Course, I could just have the brain worms. Who knows.

Re:Issue for me is pattern recognition.

[ilsaloving]

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.

[dougisfunny]

Is there a hyphen in obsessive compulsive disorder? >.>

You should go check.... three times.

Re:Issue for me is pattern recognition.

[punman]

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 others, and a white noise track. Well, the track for each was, as you said, just long enough that I could pick out the patterns, and as we listened to them to try to pick one, I was saying "no" to each one rather quickly, and she was getting more and more frustrated. Finally I said, "just try the white noise one, I don't care if it's boring, it's the only one that's going to work." Rather soon (almost immediately) I realized the track for the white noise was simply an 8 second loop and the "whiteness" JUST barely didn't match up from the end and the beginning so I could hear this tiny clip in the audio when it looped. "NOPE THIS ONE WON'T WORK EITHER" in fact, it was by far the MOST annoying one of the bunch. She never understood why, and it got returned or thrown out or donated or whatever.

But yeah.

Patterns.

They suck sometimes.

Re:Issue for me is pattern recognition.

[Oswald McWeany]

Hmmmm... ... maybe you can't sleep because you stay up all night trying to perfect looping ocean sound tracks.

Re:Issue for me is pattern recognition.

[geekoid]

" 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.

Re:Issue for me is pattern recognition.

[b4dc0d3r]

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.

Re:Issue for me is pattern recognition.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Issue for me is pattern recognition.

[lister king of smeg]

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.

secretaries??? wonder who they are up late with...

[Anonymous Coward]

secretaries??? wonder who they are up late with...

17 minutes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because we sleep 17 minutes less than Forestry workers? 17 lousy minutes? I sleep longer than that in crummy meetings.

Re:17 minutes?

[asylumx]

Well if you'd stop sleeping through meetings, we'd be higher on the list!

7 hours is sleep deprived?

[Missing.Matter]

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?"

Re:7 hours is sleep deprived?

[ironjaw33]

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.

Re:7 hours is sleep deprived?

[Redlemons]

"analysis" like these are just an easy way to get into the news.

It's not science!

Re:7 hours is sleep deprived?

[metlin]

...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?

[Nethemas the Great]

The whole thing is completely pointless with variations between professions easily attributed to statistical background noise. On any given day the same survey would yield a completely different distribution.

Re:7 hours is sleep deprived?

[metlin]

And oh, I forgot: soldiers and people in the US military. Those folks have pretty brutal schedules, too.

Re:7 hours is sleep deprived?

[Mithent]

It probably is, which probably means that the results aren't statistically significantly different. This is such a common problem: in science, if you attempt to present data that doesn't have statistical significance (i.e. it's unlikely that any difference that you see is due to chance), no-one will believe you. But in the media, tiny differences in means observed from small sample sets are regularly presented as real differences, when in all likelihood it's all down to sampling error. (How accurately do people report the amount of sleep they get, anyway?)

We're never going to see error bars and p-values in reviews and newspaper articles, though, so you just have to take stories like this with a heavy dose of salt.

Re:7 hours is sleep deprived?

[garyebickford]

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.

Re:7 hours is sleep deprived?

[couchslug]

"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 24/7 ops. They play it smart, with decent chow and lots of coffee available. (Among the first things Kitty Hawk advance teams set up when deployed to Southern Watch land bases were (many) large coffee urns.)

Of course in ground combat etc all bets are off, but the population is young and reasonably physically fit.

Medical tradition is crazy. The idea that anyone in civilian life should be repairing HUMANS after working over twelve hours is stupid.

Rotating shifts REALLY fuck people up. In aircraft maintenance we tried to place people in shifts they preferred to stay on. Swings/Mids were my favorites. All the MPHBs (Military Pointy-Haired Bosses) had gone home by then.

7h3m vs. 6h57m

[Rene S. Hollan]

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).

Really now?

[JustAnotherIdiot]

I question these results when neither Pilot nor Air Traffic Controller are on this list.

thinking about stuff

[hey]

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.

Re:thinking about dicks

[19thNervousBreakdown]

A chicken died to make a McNugget to provide the calories for that post.

Re:This has to be a joke.

[geekoid]

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/

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 on experience and profession.
Are you a Jr. maintaining some VB app? or are you writing algorithms for wall street trading software?
One makes a lot less then the other.

SO to lump all Drs and compare it to YOUR salary is stupid.

as a side note: 30K US? really? That was my starting salary of 20 years ago. Maybe that because I am on the west cost?
30K is about 15 an hour.

Anyways, make a plan, start you own consulting. Move. Also, stop with Graphic design, if you can't get hired by Apple, you're not going to make shit developing UI.

Sad, but true.

Make plan livebetter

Any idea why

[perlchild]

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?