Which is my observation too.

For the sake of Yahoo I hope Marissa Mayer is just a liar because they might be still getting their moneys worth, even if she personally needs to feel like a hero by making claims about self sacrifice etc.

If she does what she says she does in terms of sleep, e.g. 130 hour weeks, then they are paying someone millions of dollars to make decisions in a state so impaired[1] that they would be better off just a random drunk bum on the street and asking him for his vision for Yahoo.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1739867/

Everyone is not the same. I am definitely in the 8-hours-a-night camp, but a small percentage of the population seems to have a genetic variation that allows them to sleep much less.[1]

[1] http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405274870371250...

I'm sorry but I just don't buy this.

I'm Eastern European and when I was growing up I still had the cult of personality around Stalin in living memory. The sorts of claims they make about "short sleepers" there are exactly the kinds of claims that were made about Stalin and other high ranking Communists. This was the reason why they deserved to rule, just as these supposed short sleepers are the digital hyper capitalists who deserve to rule the world:

" Not only are their circadian rhythms different from most people, so are their moods (very upbeat) and their metabolism (they're thinner than average, even though sleep deprivation usually raises the risk of obesity). [...] "They encounter obstacles, they just pick themselves up and try again," [...]"Typically, at the end of a long, structured phone interview, they will admit that they've been texting and surfing the Internet and doing the crossword puzzle at the same time, all on less than six hours of sleep," says Dr. Jones. "There is some sort of psychological and physiological energy to them that we don't understand." "

Yet three years later there aren't any clinical studies that have followed these supermen for any prolonged period to see how they actually act in day to day life, just more self reports.

The dirty secret is drug use -- whether heavy caffeine or amphetamines. When we are young, pounding coffee or redbull is pretty much assumed necessary to get through a heavy credit load. Early 20s, stay up all night working and the body bounces back.

Start pushing 30 and in to middle age, these people are definitely using prescriptions drugs.

Or, they have a lot of meetings and only work for 2-3 hours.

Meetings are work and are even sometimes productive, no different to banging out code

I agree, and perhaps misspoke there.

However, I find that I have a limit to the number of hours I can program a day, and a number of hours in meetings I can have in a day, but the two don't interfere with each other much so long as I'm taking care of myself.

I think a healthy sustainable mix for maintaining flow over the long haul is probably something like - 4-5 hours coding, 0-2 hours meeting/collaboration, 1-2 hours email, 2 hours reading/writing, 1 hour lunch