this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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I’ve had plenty of breakthroughs at 9PM, but most of those could have been gotten at 11AM the next day without neglecting my family.
Writing notes for yourself is useful as a form of “rubber duck debugging”.
You're a better coder than I am/was then. Everytime, without fail, if I took that break at 9pm, left work, and came back the next day, I never solved that problem.
You come into the office the next day and you have more/new problems to solve on top of the one you were trying to solve the night before, and you have to try to get back 'into the zone' of the problem solving for that one single problem (especially when you've had to do a bunch of configurations to your IDE for the last-night problem being worked on), very problematic to do when the office is busy.
Speaking of, forgot to mention that point, but working late usually gives you a quieter office environment to work in. Its always why I would try to start work at 10am (or later) on any project I was one, give me an hour or three of "quiet' at the end of the day to wrap up work uninterrupted.
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The trick is leaving good notes to yourself outlining the thought process, what was tried, what should be tried next.
Then you read your notes in the morning with a fresh mind and <click!>
If you just slam the laptop shut in frustration, you lose all progress.
For me what generally happens if I stop at 9PM, I will work through the problem in my sleep (and it will prevent me from getting a good night sleep), but I will often find a breakthrough the next morning during shower time.
I’m talking about those hard, multi-days debugging problems that nobody can figure out, but as someone else raised, that’s why I get paid good money for it.
It still sucks though. That first response in the thread rings so true, ok now I get it, no you don’t…