Sleep Deprivation With Regards To Hackathons
It’s 4:30PM and I’m driving home from HackPSU, a 24 hour hackathon that is about 3 ½ hours away from home. I’ve been up for over 30 hours at this point and I’m exhausted. I concentrate on keeping my eyes open but every few seconds (or minutes, I can’t really tell at this point) I find my eyes becoming too heavy and the next thing I know, I’m jerking awake and correcting my car so that I’m in the lines. I’m extremely lucky nobody else is driving this way today.
I keep driving for another half hour like this, hovering in this limbo-like state, toeing the line between sleep and consciousness. Then I wake from one of these microsleeps to the sound of the rumble strip beneath my wheels and swerve back into my lane, except that I almost overcorrect and run into a truck in the other lane. At this point, I’m in no state to drive.
So what do I do? I call up my then-girlfriend who lives halfway home and tell her that I have to stop there for the night or I’ll, literally, get myself killed. Of course she obliges, not wanting me to die, and I stop at a gas station, grab some sort of energy drink, and keep my windows opened for the rest of the drive, in hopes that the cold air can keep me awake.
I end up getting to her place, unscathed, around 7:00, having had to stop and get gas, the energy drinks I mentioned, and pray that I didn’t get myself killed somewhere between there and her dorm. I have her grab some food while she goes out for some club that she’s in and I wake up the next morning, or should I say afternoon, since it’s actually 1PM. I come back to my car to see a ticket on my windshield and drive back home to make it in time for my final class. So I almost die, I get a fine, and I miss my classes. After this hackathon, I came to a realization.
Sleep deprivation sucks.
I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel pressured to stay awake during the 24 hours. At a 24 hour hackathon, sleeping seems to be a lot less common because the time constraint pushes people to feel the need to stay up the whole time, as least when compared to a 36 hour hackathon. In consulting with a few of my friends about their first hackathon, I found that, overwhelmingly, the length of the hackathon affected how pressured they felt to stay awake the entire time. For my friends that went to 36 hour hackathons, they said that they slept both Friday and Saturday nights for a few hours each night. For my friends that went to 24 hour hackathons, they said that they either didn’t sleep at all or that they only slept for 1 or 2 hours.
This is a problem.
I followed some of my friends through more of their hackathons and came to the discovery that they tended to follow the same habits as their first hackathon they attended, because they just figured that’s how it is. For my friends that went to 36 hour hackathons initially then went to a 24 hour hackathon, this was perfectly fine. To those who went to 24 hour hackathons and then went to a 36 hour hackathon, there was a problem. I had to spend time convincing them that they needed to sleep and that their code would most likely be more readable and maintainable if they would get some sleep and resume in the morning.
However, I realize that anecdotally using solely my friends that I know from school isn’t REALLY a super representative sample. So I went to the Facebook group Hackathon Hackers and asked about their experiences with sleep deprivation and hackathons. I assumed I wasn’t the only person that had problems with it, and I was right.
“I pretty much loose [sic] the whole next day to sleep” –Jemar Jones
“. . . Not sleeping, messes with my mood swings, my metabolism, and my mental state. Before [2016], I never really slept. It was really really bad because the trip back home is sooooo difficult.” –Tae Hong Min
“I no longer do the stay up all night for the entire hackathon thing. I make sure to at least get 5 hours each night because otherwise I am a wreck for two days later. . . At Hoya hacks last year I stayed up for 36+ hours and built some awesome shit. I was hyped to present and went up on stage. While I waited on stage to present I cracked. My partner identified the exact moment I snapped on the livestream. You could literally see the light go off.” –Gene Chorba
“I went to a hackathon this weekend and I didnt sleep for 40 hours straight. I have fallen sick and it has terribly affected my full time job. Hackathons tend to really fuck up my body functioning.” — Vaastav Anand
“After about 16 hours I notice things get ridiculous. It’s worse when you have to travel more than an hour or so. It would be nice if hackathons offered showers, and a place to sleep for an hour or so.” — Justin RS
However, there were a few people who didn’t have any problems with sleep, or lack of it, at hackathons.
“I think not sleeping for a weekend isn’t that big of a deal. You think our ancestors used to be able to sleep all Day and night when they were sabretooth tigers and cave bears on the prowl? Id personally opt for staying up for a weekend to work on a project that my team probably started two months before anyway.” — Zane Alexander
“Does missing a night of sleep affect me? Yes. But depending on the project, and the fact that it’s Saturday I might do that anyway. I usually abstain from the energy drinks, I’ll stay up late then nap, and do some more work.” — Evan Howl
So while there certainly are more people who have had bad experiences with sleep deprivation (or at least there are more people vocal about it), there are some who have no issues. However, the issue does still exist for a fair number of people, if this post as well as one in October, started by a person in Hackathon Hackers (we’ll call her Jane), are indicative of anything. There were 33 main comments, 167 likes, and well over 150 child comments of people’s experiences with sleep deprivation at hackathons, with most of them being negative (I stopped counting comments after seeing it was 29 pages of content when copied into Microsoft Word, spanning over 11k words).
The post begins with Jane recalling a hackathon where she and her team were trying to sleep before presentations and were unable due to loud, “obnoxious” music being played. Jane signs her post by mentioning that she “had to go to an emergency clinic after a hackathon from sleep deprivation.” So what have hackathons done to fix this problem? What CAN hackathons do to fix this problem?
I will admit, even though some hackathons offer sleeping rooms, I do not use them. I just feel weird leaving my things alone while I’m in a different room, so I usually set up my sleeping area somewhere near my stuff. I’ll try to make wherever I am as comfortable as possible, either by bringing a blanket that I cover my monitor with during travel, or by using my jacket as a small cushion to sleep on (even though that doesn’t help a bunch). I don’t know why, but I just don’t like the idea of sleeping in some dark room with a bunch of other sleeping people. Like I said, no idea why, but I just don’t like it.
However, these sleeping rooms are nowhere near common in my experiences. I have seen a room dedicated to sleeping at maybe a quarter of the hackathons I’ve gone to, if it’s even that high. With my background in being on a school board, I understand that there are a lot of hidden logistics behind the scenes that people don’t understand. For example, at MHacks I heard that the problem with sleeping rooms had to do with the fire code. These rooms are not meant for people to sleep and if they designate it as a sleeping room, they’re breaking fire code.
There are a few ways to deal with this. We can either allow people to sleep in rooms not designated as sleeping (ie the room they hack in), find an alternative venue for people to sleep in, or just disallow people from sleeping altogether. Logistically, the first option in my opinion is the easiest to implement. However, from what was said in the October Facebook post, MHacks had problems with a person from MLH not doing this. There was a person from MLH who was going through the various rooms blasting Taylor Swift where people were sleeping. In my opinion, this is a complete outrage.
If your venue prohibits designating a sleeping room, fine. But don’t wake people if they can sleep in a room with other people who are awake. Could this technically be against the fire code? Sure, it probably could be. However, discretion is a huge part of being an organizer or volunteer at a hackathon. If someone is sleeping, let them lie. If you can’t provide a room for sleeping, provide a room that is designated as being a quiet room. This could be used for meditation, people who have trouble in large social situations and may need a break from it, or for, yes, people who may need to sleep. You will have a mixed population of people who are asleep and people who are awake. This would fulfill the spirit of the fire code (while it may not fulfill the exact code down to the letter) and would allow people to sleep (as well as get some time away from everyone else).
Additionally, hackathons should try to avoid blasting music over large speakers. If people need music, they can bring headphones or small speakers. But really, what hackathons need to do is recognize and respect that people need sleep. No amount of caffeine or energy drinks is going to prevent the eventual crash that people will experience, and unless hackathons want to be named in a news article for being the reason someone crashed their car driving home — which will happen, no matter who you think is responsible — there needs to be facilities available for hackers to sleep.