The second episode of NerdTV interviews Max Levchin, co-founder of ebay, after his third all-nighter of the week:
I think there’s something very special about the all nighter ethic, and some people dig it, some people don’t. So it definitely varies per person. There’s definitely something about the nocturnal lifestyle for engineers specifically that really opens up the chakras of creativity or code writing. And people get slightly sillier, but also maybe a little bit more creative. And they get tired and there’s some spirit and camaraderie that wakes up in those hours, and you get more done because you’re not afraid to tell people to shove it when they’re doing something wrong, and the interactions become more interesting.But also I think there’s this massive value that you harness when you’re doing an all nighter where you’ve gone for presumably 7 or 8 hours of work and you’re really getting up to a point where something’s about to be born, and then you go for 8 more hours. And instead of stopping to go to sleep and let some of these ideas dissipate, you actually focus on the findings you’ve made in the last few hours and you just go crazy and do some more of that.
There’s definitely a downside, because as you get more and more tired your effective IQ probably drops some. And so you have to start being more careful. But if you’ve been around the block enough times you do things like mutual code reviews and you look at what you’ve done and make sure people are sane about it.