As A Developer, Is Waking Up At 8 AM Too Late?
Working from home is fun
A data analysis on the Stack Overflow survey.
Introduction
When it comes to the morning routine, everyone has their own preference. Some wake up at 5 AM, feed the dog, review Hacker News and go to work. Some are roused at 8:55 and join the Zoom meeting at 9 without webcam open.
I found a survey conducted by Stack Overflow in 2018 showing the wake time of respondents. Coming up with a few questions, I want to search for some interesting insights by answering them.
1. In which country do developers get up early?
Developers from about 200 countries responded to this survey. To have fewer biases, for this question I only consider top 10 countries with the most survey responses.
By calculating the percentage of wake time for each country, we can generate a bar plot below.
Australia developers wake up relatively early compared to developers in other countries as their percentages are noticeable in the wake time 5-6 AM and 6-7 AM.
France holds the lead in the wake time 7-8 AM and 8-9 AM, indicating most French developers are comfortable with waking up at 7-9 AM as I am.
Also, it is interesting to see a fair size of developers in Russia like to wake up late since their percentages of wake up time after 8 AM cannot be unseen.
Overall, most developers awaken between 6-8 AM (shame on me).
2. Do people using different programming languages wake up at different times?
To be less biased, I only look into 15 most popular programming languages as below.
| Language | Count |
|---|---|
| JavaScript | 48808 |
| HTML | 47683 |
| CSS | 45349 |
| SQL | 39957 |
| Java | 31189 |
| Bash/Shell | 28624 |
| Python | 27340 |
| C# | 24028 |
| PHP | 21014 |
| C++ | 17374 |
| C | 15632 |
| TypeScript | 12309 |
| Ruby | 7164 |
| Swift | 5594 |
| Go | 5095 |
All of the most popular programming languages have a similar distribution in wake up time. One of a few differences that can be noticed is developers using C# tend to wake up between 5-7 AM more than other developers.
3. Does wake up time have an effect on job satisfaction?
From all 60401 responses regarding job satisfaction, we can find most developers were moderately satisfied with their job as below.
Adding more granularity into the distribution above and replacing number counts with percentages, we could observe the distribution of wake time for each job satisfaction.
The distribution of each job satisfaction looks similar, showing that most developers were not forced to work at the time they didn’t want to. This also demonstrates either waking up early or waking up late does not have an impact on your work satisfaction. Therefore, maybe getting up at the time most comfortable to you is a good practice (as long as it does not mess with your work or study schedules).
4. Do people getting up at different times earn different?
Fortunately, the survey does provide the converted salary in US dollars considering respondents’ salaries in different currencies.
By binning the salary, we can check the distribution of wake time by salary.
Each salary range has a similar distribution tending toward 6-7 AM and 7-8 AM. It is not obvious that developers waking up early earn more or less than others. Thus, we may conduct a hypothesis test to see if there is any difference.
Mann-Whitney U Test
Group 1: the developers who wake up between 6:01 - 7:00 AM
Group 2: the developers who wake up between 5:00 - 6:00 AM
Null hypothesis H0: salaries of group 1 earn less than group 2.
Alternative hypothesis H1: salaries of group 1 does not earn less than group 2.
Significance level: 0.05
The result of this hypothesis test shows the p value is 0.000, indicating the salaries of group 1 did not equal or fall below the salaries of group 2. Therefore, reject H0 and support the claim that the group 1 earn more than group 2.
I also want to add that the test result does not specify any relationship between wake up time and salary, which means getting up early does not guarantee more earnings and vice versa. I guess such result was caused by developer’s occupation. Developers earning less than $5000 were more likely to be students, freelancers and startup founders. There was a higher proportion of developers who woke up early was in this group. And developers who have a stable salary prefer getting up at the normal working time.
Conclusion
In this article, we took a look at wake time of developers regarding their country, programming languages, job satisfaction and salary.
- Relatively, Australian developers woke up earlier, French developers preferred getting up at normal working hours and Russian developers awoke later. Overall, most developers roused between 6-8 AM.
- Using any popular programming language did not mean you were more likely to wake up earlier or later.
- The wake up time did not affect your job satisfaction.
- The data did not tell the relationship between wake time and salary. However, we found that, as a group, developers waking up between 6-7 AM earned more than developers waking up between 5-6 AM as a group.
The findings are observational, not the result of a formal study. Are you surprised by the results?
To see more about this analysis, see the link to my Github available here.