Getting Old: Sleep Deprivation

This might end up being a series down the road, so might as well get a dumb name attached to it. Obviously I’m not actually getting old, just older. I’m making my way through my 30s and noticing with each year how I can’t do the same things I was able to in my teens and 20s. Then I will inevitably go through the same process in my 40s, 50s, etc. But one area of getting older definitely came up during my trip to Ireland this past week, and that is that I don’t handle sleep deprivation nearly as well as I used to. So this short post will be about that.

The impetus for this thought came from the fact that my wife and I took a red-eye flight to Dublin from NYC, landing around 8:00am on Saturday. With the time difference and not being able to sleep on the plane, that put me at 20 hours of being awake, and the idea was to push through until the end of the day in order to minimize jet lag, which would’ve made it at least 32 hours total. Back in my teens and early-20s, that would’ve been easy as I have done it multiple times. But this time it was really tough and we ended up crashing for a nap at the 28 hour mark after nearly passing out during lunch.

I wouldn’t necessarily say that this means 28 hours is my limit for how long I can stay up now, as traveling does a lot to fatigue you outside of just being awake, but I don’t have any other data points to refute it and I don’t intend to try to get more. It seems to fall in line with how I feel on days when my body wants to just keep going all night, when it’s easy to go for a whole 24 hours before I force myself to sleep. But it is quite a bit less than my early days when I would go a whole two days, around 36-40 hours, without much trouble. Back then I would definitely hit a wall around the 24 hour mark, but if I could get past it then I would feel fine until the next natural time to go to sleep. These days the wall comes sooner and eventually I just can’t go any further.

Which is all for the better I suppose. I’m at an age where I don’t feel any real need to push myself like that anymore. In high school and college, I would use this ability to get a lot more done. Not necessarily for doing actual work, but for playing games and watching TV/movies it was really nice. And though I think differently about it now, I was convinced at the time that depriving myself of sleep wasn’t having that much of an impact. Especially during college, I would regularly go days or weeks on 3 hours of sleep a night, and I would eventually crash and reset with a night where I would sleep for 12-16 hours. I thought this was perfectly fine and a great advantage to me, though I know many of my teachers thought otherwise as I struggled to stay awake at times. I know I could never get away with that now, when even just 6 hours a night for a week leaves me struggling.

I guess one of the reasons why I think on this topic pretty often is that I still wish I could get away with it. I know that I can get away with sleeping 6 hours a night for a little while, but I can’t keep it up, as much as I want to make it work. Two extra hours a day to do stuff is nothing to scoff at, and it seems like it should be doable since I naturally wake up after 6 hours of sleep every day anyway. Over the years I’ve learned that my sleep cycles tend to finish at 3 and 6 hours, and then again at each hour after that (7, 8, 9, etc.). This is why the 3 hours a night thing worked at all. So most nights when I sleep, I will wake up after 6 hours anyway, and then I will fall back asleep and wake up at 7 hours, then again at 8 hours. Usually at 8 hours, sometimes 9 hours, I will be done sleeping and not be able to get more even if I want to. I just wish that I could always feel great and rested after that first 6. Sometimes I do (like today when I’m writing this), but after a few days I really need to get that full 8 to avoid fatigue headaches.

On the plus side, I rarely suffer from sleep deprivation unintentionally these days. I used to think that I was a partial insomniac because I would struggle to sleep all the time, which partly led me to intentionally depriving myself since I wasn’t going to sleep anyway. But now it happens rarely, and even when it does I can usually use one of the tricks I’ve learned along the way to force my mind to calm down enough to let sleep take hold.

In the end, I continue to wish that days were just a little bit longer so that I could take advantage of my body’s natural inclination to stay up longer than 16 hours and still get in the full 8 when I need to. I just have to make due with what I’ve got.

On Creativity

This week’s post might get a bit rambly, but I’ll try to provide some scaffolding to what I want to talk about. Incidentally, if you’re wondering why I would say something like that at the beginning of a written piece of work, it’s because I never go back through these posts and edit for content. They are all streams of consciousness and I just proofread for grammar and clarity. I don’t have time to go back and rewrite these to be essays. Which is part of why I came up with this post’s topic: creativity and how I try to make room for it in my life.

Creativity has always been a big part of my life, as it is for everyone really. We all just go about it in different ways. We may not all remember it, but almost all of us grew up with active imaginations because that’s just how kids figure out how the world works. We all grow up with books, movies, TV shows, music, art, and games that suggest new ideas we hadn’t thought of before, and it’s only natural to take those ideas and smash them together into new ones. And once in a while you come up with an idea that is completely new, and if you have the means to get it out into the world then it can inspire millions more after you.

For me growing up, the first outlet that I can remember using for my ideas was through writing short stories and poems. Of course none of my ideas were original back then, I was actually known for taking existing stories and modernizing them. I didn’t realize it at the time, obviously, but I was doing the common thing of adapting an old story for a new audience. It worked out pretty well for me though since a few of them were recognized for being really good for a kid, and one even turned into an actual play that my class put on for my high school.

During high school my outlets grew significantly as I started getting really into music, video editing, and programming. While I never actually got around to picking up an instrument until after college, my desire to play mostly began there when I started going to shows and seeing other friends play in bands. The video editing centered around mashing together songs I liked with clips of video from other things I liked. I had essentially stumbled into making AMVs (anime/animated music videos), and it was my music outlet for a while since I couldn’t make my own music. I did some other video projects in college, but nothing close to actually making a film. And as for programming, it was largely just making dumb websites and calculator games. Looking back on it, I didn’t see them so much as creative outlets as learning how to do it. Unlike my writing and videos, I had no real intention of having my programming projects viewed by others, I just did them for myself.

From college onward, the only real change was swapping the video editing with making music as writing and programming have stuck with me. While I had a great time making videos, it was too time consuming and it would only get worse if I wanted to improve on the skills I had. There’s only so much you can do with other peoples’ works, and to be a real editor I would’ve had to learn how to do effects and other advanced compositing that I didn’t want to learn. Learning to play, and eventually write my own, music was a lot more accessible and rewarding.

And that’s where I currently sit in terms of what areas I want to put my creative energy into. Writing, programming, and music. I know that I don’t have the patience to make videos of any kind these days, and I’ve never had an eye for visual design, whether it be drawing, painting, illustrating, or making graphics.

Of these three, the easiest one to do is obviously programming because that is what I do for a living. And as a job it is rewarding, especially when the end product is both elegant to look at (as code) and useful for others. The second easiest one is writing because it requires only something to write on and your brain. For the time being I am doing it all through these posts, but still aiming to do more. Making music is a little tougher now that I’m not in a band anymore. I have the means to come up with the music, but in order to actually listen to it I need to invest in learning some DAW software to make it happen. It’s either that or get a lot better at playing multiple instruments.

As I just mentioned, I do spend some time on writing these posts, but I want to do more. I would not qualify these as creative, I’m simply writing down what I’m saying in my head about a topic. It has been many years since I actually completed something that I would consider a creative work (the albums with my band don’t count here). Probably not since I did NaNoWriMo back in 2010. I find that rather disappointing.

What keeps me back? It shouldn’t be a surprise. It always comes down to prioritizing doing creative work over other things. I’ve been talking at length recently about passions and priorities, and the writing ideas I have in my head don’t quite reach either one of those driving factors. I think about the ideas all the time, particularly when in bed. Scoping out stories is the quickest way I know to actually fall asleep because it turns off the rest of my brain that’s constantly trying to relive past events. But, obviously, that doesn’t get me any closer to actually having a written story. None of the ideas are so good that I’m mindlessly driven to work on them, so I have to actively set aside time to work on anything. Sadly, playing games and watching videos are easier to do, so I default to those most days.

The nagging doubt is also always there. If I was passionate about these ideas, then I would find a way to make it happen. Since I don’t, then it must not be worthwhile right? This occurs to me all the time, and it’s a big reason why I have been okay with not pursuing these ideas for so many years. My stupid ego wants to see the completed projects because then people will praise my work, but it has largely come to terms with the idea that none of it will ever see the light of day. Making stuff is easy when you are young. You have all the time in the world and you don’t really care if it’s good or not. Now that I’m older, I have no time and my views change year after year, so I find it more difficult to believe that anything I have to say will matter.

I think that last point is the most poignant. While it is not required to struggle to make good art, it certainly helps. It makes it easier to empathize and create themes you want to get across to others. To some degree, the point of making art is to have other people relate to it. And I just don’t see myself as someone with a message needing to get out there. I’m a middle-class white guy, privileged as all hell, and have wanted for nothing my whole life. Basically, the last person anyone should ask for an opinion about anything. On top of that I’m not an expert at anything, so I can’t even come from that angle.

But at the same time I know that if I never get these ideas out of my head, they will never go away. So even if I have nothing important to say, perhaps it’s worth my time just to say I did it? It will always be a hard choice because I have no intention of making doing creative stuff my actual job, so the opportunity costs have to be weighed against just relaxing and having fun. Between time needed to work, commute, eat, sleep, and do the other necessities, I only end up with 15-20 hours a week to do what I want. And of course I want to spend some of that time being with friends and people I love.

I think I’m going to continue taking the fun for now. But I could put aside even three hours a week to work on some stuff, that’d be a good step in the right direction. I can spare at least that much.

Half a Year in NYC (Nightlife)

It’s been close enough to half a year living in New York City that I’m willing to bend the timeline a little bit. This is going to be another short post in what has become an ongoing series about how NYC is different from Seattle. This week, as it has been getting more relevant as the weather continues to get nicer, a few observations on nightlife.

The most obvious difference between NYC and Seattle is that bars stay open until 4am rather than 2am. I don’t know if it makes that much of a difference to me though since I don’t like staying up that late anyway. I’m at an age and place in my life now where I doubt I will ever close out a bar in NYC like I did many times in Seattle.

However, it does seem like this shift in closing time does have an overall impact on when people go out and how late they stay out. Maybe I’m not a good judge of this, but there are several areas where I’ve noticed this shift. In Seattle, when I would do a happy hour after work with friends or coworkers, it always seemed to die off by 7pm, no matter who it was or where we were. In New York, the happy hour often doesn’t even start until then, so the times when I have gone out with friends and coworkers after work, it will go until 9 or 10pm. I’m also used to weeknights ending around 10pm and having it feel like a short night. Now I’m getting used to hanging out until midnight on a regular basis, and it feels great.

The environment also plays a factor. Both in terms of weather and in terms of the city itself, as I’ve mentioned in previous posts. People are more likely to stay out later because it’s warm and bright out. People are more likely to stay out later because they live close by and it’s an easy train or bike ride home. There’s a cultural feeling here of gathering and having a good time that Seattle seems to lack. People like to talk about the Seattle Freeze, and I never gave it much mind because I never had those issues with meeting people there. But compared to a place like NYC with its density and diversity, I understand how some people get that impression.

I personally found the shift to be subtle, and I didn’t really think about it that much until more recently, which is why I haven’t spoken of it until now. I had to go to multiple places to realize that happy hours here last until later. It took months to realize that more people get out of work at 6:00 than 5:00, and it shows in how the trains are busiest from 6-7 and restaurants get crowded from 7-8. When I stop paying attention to what time it is during the evenings, I find myself surprised that I still feel great at midnight when I should be tired.

It’s all rather pleasant to be honest. I find myself wanting to be more active later and be around people. I don’t feel as rushed in the evenings as I used to. Of course I do still often wonder where the evening went when I haven’t done anything, but that’s beside the point.

There is a part of me that wonders if this feeling is largely because my experience thus far has been going from winter to summer. The days get longer and the weather gets nicer, so it’s easy to notice how that makes everyone more positive. We will have to see if this remains true in the second half of the year as everything reverses. I suspect it will stay this way until mid-autumn, but after that is the true test.

Hiring the Best

As I mentioned in a recent post, I have an intern this summer who is helping me do some of the work that the other members of my team do not have the technical know-how to do. This is significant for us as a team because we have been trying to fill a spot to do this work ever since I started, and it’s been difficult to say the least. Thinking about this has naturally led me to think about being part of the interviewing process, and how it is a skill that I’ve surprisingly become quite good at.

Interviewing was certainly never something I saw myself doing through my first few jobs. You grow up thinking that interviewing is the realm of managers and important people. Interviewers are also supposed to be really tough and out to get you. So I was a bit surprised when I eventually got asked to help with interview loops at Amazon since I don’t fit any of those preconceived notions. But once I learned how the process worked, it made a lot of sense to be a part of it, and I soon grew to like it a lot.

I’m going to focus on three things here. First, why the Amazon process is so good. Second, why I find the process at my current company lacking in comparison. And third, what I’ve learned from being a part of both.

The title of this post comes from one of Amazon’s famous leadership principles, “Hire and Develop the Best”. And like all of their principles, Amazon throws a lot of resources at fulfilling that goal. The hiring process certainly isn’t perfect, as nothing is, but it does tend to hire the best the vast majority of the time.

There are three reasons why the hiring process works well. First, after the initial phone screen to measure basic skills for the role, the in-house loop contains 4-6 interviews, depending on the level of the role. The two most important aspects about the loop are that: each interviewer covers different skills and competencies, and interviewers never know what the other interviewers think until after they’ve made a decision to hire or not. These aspects ensure that loops are consistent, thorough, and as objective as possible.

Second, the company ensures that every interviewer has the right tools to get the job done. Obviously it is up to each interviewer to use them correctly (and it is clear that many do not), but it is super helpful overall. The tools ensure the important aspects of loops that I already spoke of are enforced. The hiring scheduler makes sure everyone involved knows exactly where to be, when to be there, what they need to cover, and hides other feedback before you make your decision. If an interviewer is not sure how to cover their assigned competencies, there are guidelines on what to ask and what to look for. There are mandatory training programs that each interviewer has to take, plus shadowing with an experienced interviewer, before they can go solo. I personally have some issues with those programs, but they do set a baseline that avoids bad situations that lead to candidates having a bad experience.

Third, every loop must have a third-party interviewer on it. This is done through Bar Raisers. Their purpose on loops is to make sure the candidate is a good fit for the company in order to prevent managers from hiring bad people out of desperation to fill out their team. Bar Raisers also make sure that loops are constructed properly beforehand, they lead the debriefs, and they have ultimate veto power if the manager continues to push for a hire when it’s a bad idea. This is the one area that sets Amazon apart from similar companies, and one of the reasons I got so good at interviewing is because I trained to be one.

I really enjoyed the whole process that Amazon put in place and it’s part of why I wanted to get more involved with interviewing more and more as I worked there.

Where I work now, things are… not the same. There is no real process to speak of, so I’ve been doing my best to put some in. Maybe it is different for other positions within the company, but for hiring people for my team the only process we have in place is that there is a phone screen and (if possible) an in-house with just two interviews. Possibly a third one if it’s warranted. I don’t feel this gathers enough data to make an educated decision.

But what I have been struggling the most with is that there is no goal in mind. What made the Amazon process so easy was that every role was clearly defined and when you went into the interview, you knew exactly what data points you were trying to get. Where I am now, the role is unclear and shifts depending on who we have at the moment, and my only direction is to “find out their technical ability.” I mean, I’m fully capable of doing that, but it’s pretty broad. It saddens me that technical ability is the only real factor in the decision, since team/culture fit is also important, but our company isn’t interested in that.

I know that I shouldn’t expect anything else from a startup. I’m not working at one of the biggest companies in the world anymore, that everyone in tech wants to work at, and gives offers to less than 20% of candidates. Obviously there’s no reason to have the same rigorous process, so I can live with it. The only thing that really annoys me about this new process is that people can’t stop telling me what they think when they finish and before I’ve had my turn. It’s a bad practice, skewing what interviewers think before they meet the candidate. I go out of my way now to not listen and get into the room as quickly as possible to avoid getting those negative impressions.

Overall the process of learning to interview has been really rewarding and helpful in other areas as well. I’ve historically been really bad at making small talk with people because I can’t think of questions to ask, or how to lead conversations. It’s a lot easier to answer other people when they ask about me. While I’m still not great at it, interviewing has forced me to be better at it, even though it’s in a different context. With interviewing, it’s easy to lead because I know exactly what I’m looking for. With just normal chit-chat, I still struggle because I have no real direction until something reveals itself. I have a lot of trouble getting interested in other people without some prompting. Interviewing has also gotten me more comfortable with just talking to people I don’t know, especially over the phone.

I’ve also learned how to prepare for interviewing people. When first starting out, I would try to just wing it, but I would never get the information I was looking for, which was a big no-no. So I started using templates to guide things better. When I got a competency I wasn’t used to interviewing for, I would have to get new questions, and over time I learned which questions worked and which ones didn’t. When I started doing the Bar Raiser program, I had to retool my whole process because I still wasn’t getting the data they wanted. I had to get a lot better at listening and really digging into the answers I was being given. That alone has paid the most dividends in how I interview people. By the end of my career there, I had a really good system going and I could get ready for a loop in 15 minutes or less, regardless of what role the candidate was interviewing for, or what I was asked to get data on.

This is all to say, I certainly have no intention to stop interviewing just because I don’t agree with how it’s done in my new company. I still like being a part of the process, knowing that my opinion is important and I get to have some control in deciding who I work with. And while I don’t get the same opportunities or feelings of success as I used to, I’m still learning and getting better at it all the time.

Goals Update: Mid-Year 2019

It has been super hard to find time or motivation to write lately, but at the very least I can get in a quick update about where goals are for the year. There were some changes I made about a month ago to one of the goals, and I’m going to talk about another one I decided to make. So the TL;DR version of this post is: two goals are still on track, though lagging behind lately, and two goals have been outright changed to better reflect how things are.

Run a Half-Marathon in Under 2 Hours -> Beat My Best 5K Time

I knew a month ago that there was no way I was going to run a half-marathon by the end of the year, much less crush my previous best by 15+ minutes. While I have been good at working out more often, my eating habits have not been improving, so progress is hard coming. I still think it is possible for me to get fit enough to improve in some way though, so we are just going to switch the half-marathon to a 5K.

I’ve run plenty of 5Ks, especially in the early days when I started running and I was working up to longer distances, but I didn’t get many of them recorded, so I don’t know what my actual best time is. All I have to go on is what I do have recorded from my races, which indicates my best 5K is 26:30. This was basically right after my first half-marathon as a way of recovering, so not me at my best fitness, but still a decent time. Thus, new goal, beat that time.

Publish a Post Every Week

Up until this past month I was doing well here. Having to catch up sometimes, but mostly getting them done on time, even if at the last minute. But lately the motivation has been lacking. For once I have enough things to write about, but I’d rather just do other things. It’s summer now, so doing more activities and I’ve also had some bad luck with illness. Got a summer cold that knocked me out for four days this past week, which means watching a lot of SGDQ and playing easy games.

Still, I have no doubt that I will be able to finish this out. I’ve got a few posts to catch up on right now, but eventually things will get back to the normal cadence. Just a bunch of distractions lately that will go away soon. Hopefully motivation will come back too, but I can always push through until I do (like I did with this post).

Listen to 200 New Albums

Last update I was at 33 albums, this time I’m at 51 albums. Halfway through the year, that’s not great progress. I basically have to listen to triple the amount of music I already have so far.

There are a couple reasons for this. One, I haven’t had nearly as much time to listen to podcasts or music or anything at work as I expected. I knew pretty early on it would be harder than it was at Amazon, but it’s gotten even worse as people have gotten to rely on me more. The pros and cons of open space offices. Collaboration is undoubtedly better, but focus time is much worse. I get pulled away from my tasks so often to help others that it’s not worth having headphones on most of the time.

So yeah, my original plan of using work time to get a bunch of listening done isn’t working too well. Need to find another strategy. I really want to increase the amount of time I spend on writing, so that will be a perfect time to get new music in. That’s not super reliable though since I can’t guarantee more writing will happen. I think ultimately it’s going to come down to reducing video consumption since that eats into podcast time, which eats into music time.

No real updates on albums that have stood out to me since last time. Finished the whole Queen catalog, and I listened to a lot more Stone Sour than I probably should have, but I just really like their stuff (Come What(ever) May is legit one of my favorite albums ever).

Make a Focusing/Quitting Habit

As I (tried to) explain in a post a month ago about Passions and Priorities, I have effectively given up on this goal. I haven’t fully decided what it should be replaced with, but what I’ve been trying to do since then is focus on one thing at a time, even if it’s not fun to do so. It’s not a new concept to me, I’ve tried it a couple times over the last few years to short-term success. But, going back to that previous post, since I find it hard to keep focusing on something unless it grabs my attention fully, it’s not going well this time around either. So it can’t be the long term solution, but it can help for now until something else clicks.

The other question with this is simply figuring out how to give myself the time I want to focus on anything. Inevitably it always comes back to being lazy about doing the things that are high priority and getting distracted by things that are the lowest priority. The internet is bad and I find it harder to ignore it all the time.

I’ve got nothing else for now. Turning out to be another year where I’m re-learning the lessons that I’d forgotten from failing in previous years. On the plus side, this really only impacts my hobbies. I’m still a very responsible person with a good job that I excel at, so I’m not a total screw up. I just have too many freaking interests and too many freaking distractions. Feeling like crap all the time because I can’t get healthy is having an impact too.

Sigh.