Engineers Ravi Dankanikote, left, and Quan Nguyen burn the midnight oil at CACI International in Springfield. (By Lucian Perkins – The Washington Post)

By Mark Leibovich
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 8, 1998; Page A1

Like many computer programmers, Scott McLoughlin works best when the day's distractions are at home sleeping. Come midnight in his Herndon office, he often finds his brain entangled in digital abstractions, fueled by 15 cups of coffee. He takes melatonin pills to wind down when he's finally done. When sleep comes, he sometimes dreams in computer code.

As the rate of high-tech innovation accelerates, it is clashing increasingly with the body's essential need to rest. This is especially true among the Washington area's burgeoning population of tech workers, who are conforming to a time-honored nocturnal ethic that has long subverted normal sleep patterns in places such as Silicon Valley, where many parking lots are crowded at 2 a.m.

Futons, cots and bean-bag chairs are becoming fixtures at many local tech offices. "We're approaching a critical mass of night tech work here," said McLoughlin, 32, who runs a small software engineering firm, Adrenaline Group Inc. "You can visit most tech companies now and find someone there after 11."

High-tech workers are not the only ones on the job at that time – factory workers, police officers, truckers, cab drivers and health-care professionals keep late hours, too. But in the technology world, laboring into the early morning often is not necessarily shift work. Rather, it is part of a trend in the rapidly growing industry where personal preference and corporate culture breed an employee who is more comfortable with working at the computer terminal long after the sun goes down.

Some sleep experts question whether these stolen hours really result in higher productivity. Others call the hours an insidious example of how technology – e-mail, for example – has weakened the barriers between personal time and work time, personal place and work place.

Either way, local technology workers said, this rapid-fire regimen is necessary, mandated by their industry's intense competition in a worldwide marketplace that is outpacing its time zones. In the pursuit of beating rivals to market, product cycles have shrunk and release dates have been moved up.

Besides, many engineers said, technical work is best suited to after-hours solitude, and the practice tends to breed habitual night crawlers.

Good programming requires thinking like the computer, said Eric Loeb, chief technology officer at Net.Capitol Inc., a Washington company that develops Internet software for public affairs professionals. "You have to run the code through your head, and the process is not as linear as reading regular text," said Loeb, 35, who regularly works until 2 or 3 a.m. unless he has an "early 11 a.m." meeting to attend the next day.

Loeb first encountered high-tech's nocturnal subculture amid the 3 a.m. lab crowds at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It's easier to reach this hyperfocused programming state at night, he said, when there are fewer interruptions. "None of the suit-and-tie people mess with you at night," said Bryan Brossart, an animator at Magnet Interactive, a Georgetown firm that designs World Wide Web sites for corporate clients. "After hours, that side of the world leaves."

Brossart often gets to work at noon and stays past midnight. He tries to sleep six hours a night and recently kicked a caffeine dependency that he says had him downing eight quadruple espressos a day.

Predictably, the most habitual night crawlers are under 40 and childless. Engineers often speak of trying to maximize their "overdrive" years, while their bodies are still resilient and their lives not yet colonized by "adult" considerations, such as starting a family.

Brossart, now 30, has worked in high-tech jobs for seven years and has grown accustomed to a night schedule. His wife is five months pregnant, and when their child is born Brossart predicts he'll work past midnight just once a week, down from three now. But until then he'll keep grinding in the pre-dawn hours with his face lit by a lava lamp and three 20-inch computer monitors. "I get three times more work done at 3 a.m. than I do at 6 p.m.," he said.

Experts would question this.

"If you look at any number of studies, working at night results in a loss of sleep, and this negatively affects concentration, memory and complex skills," said James Maas, a professor of psychology at Cornell University who chronicled the effects of repeated sleep loss in a book called "Power Sleep."

Some managers say the screwy hours are counterproductive and have instituted policies to promote "balanced" work hours. Kyle Yost, an engineering manager at Microstrategy Inc. in Vienna, said engineers in his division are required to attend 9:30 meetings each morning. They were instituted, he said, partly to curb all-night work, which often resulted in engineers coming in at noon.

Nonetheless, at 2 a.m. on a recent Thursday, Microstrategy's offices were scattered with engineers racing against a product deadline. Yost planned to be in his bed in Arlington by 3 a.m., sleep five hours, then return for the 9:30 meeting. Sometimes he leaves work so late he encounters morning rush-hour traffic, he said.

Yost, 27, tries to sleep six hours on weeknights and catch up with marathon slumber on weekends. He said it's harder to rebound from all-nighters than during his days at Amherst College. "My body has deteriorated, my nutrition is bad and I eat too much pizza," Yost said. "But at this point in my life, creating this technology is my passion."

Computers are hardly the first technology wave to affect sleep patterns. Before Thomas Edison invented the light bulb in 1879, humans typically slept between 8½ and nine hours a night, sleep experts say. Many experts believe that innovations during this century – television, e-mail, all-night stores – have cut steadily into the nation's slumber. Average sleep time in America has dropped an estimated 20 percent since 1900, according to the National Commission on Sleep Disorders Research.

There is little data to suggest that prolonged sleep loss can directly cause long-term health problems. But a study published last year in the journal Sleep found that missing two to three hours of sleep every night for a week seriously undermines mood, alertness and performance in a typical adult.

This cultural erosion of downtime "has significant social and policy implications for the future," said Ed Bersoff, chief executive of BTG Inc., an information technology services company in Fairfax.

Bersoff awoke at 4 on a recent morning and checked his e-mail. At 4:15, he recalls, he sent a note to a BTG senior manager, and a few minutes later received a response. "It was quite a shock to realize that the two of us were up and working before 5 a.m.," Bersoff said in an e-mail message to a reporter. "The point here is that computers and communications have blurred the line between home and work."

Technology companies offer the best microcosm of this phenomenon. Pushing the limits of normal schedules follows a common mythology – some would say pathology – among the more obsessive engineers. They have historically reveled in the notion that what they do is a superhuman endeavor that demands superhuman effort.

Plus, many engineers say their brains are simply not programmed – nor is their work conducive – to leaving problems unsolved at the office at 6 p.m.

"You just need to keep working until you're finished with a problem," said Diana Lopez, 24, a Microstrategy programmer. "It's hard to walk away before you're done creating."

Engineers say at times they experience the sensation athletes call "the zone," a time-warp state characterized by intense concentration. Technical workers describe the experience of flicking on the computer to tinker with a problem for a few minutes. "Next thing you realize, you've been up all night," Yost said.

In hard-core technical work, the key to being productive is getting your whole mind to focus on the machine, McLoughlin said. By and large, those most adept at programming are best able to focus. "You have to shut out the world," he said. "And it's much easier to do this at night."