An enduring stereotype about hackers—as opposed to those who program only as a day job—is that they get up at noon, start programming in the late afternoon, and keep programming for most of the night. Many of us, me included, are preternaturally night people. But that mostly works for young people. Once you get a bit older and start your own family, keeping those hours is a non-starter.
But the question arises: is this stereotype accurate or is it a legend perpetrated by a few outliers? Ivan Bessarabov decided to find out. That’s not as hard as you might think. His idea was to check the times that some famous open source programmers made commits to GitHub.
The results weren’t surprising. They were, in fact, just what you’d expect. Some, perhaps many, programmers from this subset did adhere to the stereotype but others—Linus Torvalds, for example—work on a normal day schedule.
None of this really matters at all except as a cautionary tale for those anal micromanagers who want everybody to be in the office for a set of fixed hours. Still, it is interesting and I’d be interested in a wider survey. One could, of course, just look at all the GitHub repositories and parse out the individual contributors but some of those will doubtless be people working at places like Red Hat and contributing as part of their day jobs.
I’m not sure how you’d filter for those programmers who can work whatever hours they choose. Even then, you’d get lots of people, like Linus, who can theoretically work whenever they like but have family responsibilities that limit their actual available work times.
I’m sure, that with enough effort, this could be done but it’s probably not important enough to be worth the effort. As for me, I’d be working into the night except that, you know, family.