The terms night and day confused me a little. I consider myself a morning person, but a night programmer. I thrive in the early mornings, but I have all the traits described here as a night programmer.
Firstly, thanks for posting this (very old) post of mine to hacker news. I didn't even register the traffic initially because it is one of my more popular posts (referenced by various people).
The point of the article wasn't to say that good programmers work at night, or in the morning. It was more about drawing the distinction between those programmers that are driven and invest time in themselves and their career.
Glad that you align more closely with the Night Programmer mindset - good for you!
Not really. I wrote this post when I was doing a lot of consulting around software development. I was working with lots of different companies and was comparing some of the individuals involved and how easily they could grasp some new concepts.
The defining characteristic was some/all of those attributes that I ascribed to Night Programmers. That isn't to say that I think Day Programmers are worthless - that isn't the case, but I personally would rather work with Night Programmers. Makes life more interesting.
Since that post was written, others have observed that Night Programmers might be difficult to work with which may well be the case given that their passion might lead them to odd work behaviours and extreme points of view.
