I find that I still can do the all nighters but much like the festive overconsumption of alcohol, the recovery time tripled and made the whole thing very much not worth it (except maybe on very rare occasions).

Sure I can stay up all night but it really just ruins the entire next week.

I swore them off after my last one. Mid 40s. All nighters used to be a source of joy though to get what felt like days worth of work done in a single sitting enabled by the absence of distractions

It's anecdotal, but several nasty bugs involved code committed (according to git blame) between 11pm and 6am. Sometimes I hardly recognized the code as mine.

Write drunk, edit sober

Twain or something

Early-40s here who still does all-nighters. How long is recovery time for you? What does it entails -ie what doesn't work as much as it should / takes longer while you recover?

Mid 40s and I'll still do all-nighters on occasion when necessary. Recovering from sleep is no problem, recovering from an angry wife after sleeping well into the afternoon is trickier! ;D

This lol. At least she’s keeping you healthy by preventing you from wrecking your sleep schedule :-)

I'm very tired a mildly stupid and my body has no idea at all when it should be asleep for about a week at which point i'm mostly but not entirely better. then again I always had trouble with keeping a regular sleep schedule

I have long since learned how to maintain a healthy sleep schedule when the system is not disturbed by stupid decisions, my techniques just don't work as quickly as they used to. (the most impactful technique is "don't stay up all night, idiot")

At 37, it always seems like I’m still fine after several days of this, but then randomly I’ll suddenly be so sick that I need days to recover.

I’m guessing this means that the longer it goes on, the worse of an idea it will be.

Early 40's too lets jam together

I hit 40 this year. I have definitely noticed a slowdown even in the last few years. Before 30 I could pull 2-3 all-nighters a week without really feeling any ill effects.

Then, maybe early-to-mid 30's I could only handle one per week, assuming I'd slept well otherwise. The sleep debt would be too high still and the next day I'd get headaches, feel extremely tired and unmotivated. Or I could sustain 2-4hrs of sleep a night for like 3-4 days, but again I'd pay for it if I didn't catch up (pretty sure I'm paying for it long-term anyways).

Here at the end of my 30's I can't really do a full 40-hours straight without sleep anymore (16hr day, 8hr night, 16hr day, then sleep). If I don't get at least 2hrs overnight then that second day is mostly wasted, maybe I get 4hrs out of the 16.

I've always known that sufficient sleep is important for your health, and I've tried to balance times of all-nighters with crashes to catch-up, but the allure of using the night as uninterrupted focus time is so strong when you work in modern corporate "open-plan" environments where always-on Slack/Teams presence is expected during business hours.

I'm much the same. For me, though, the best all-nighters have come from when insomnia hits and I can't stop thinking about a bug. Then I cave in, get out of bed, and hack away.

It's essential to have a flexible employer though.

come over for pizza and lets work on a project together :3

Why would you sleep on the couch?

Because it is one of the best sleeps when work/code/game until you pass out.

probably to avoid waking up his wife/kids if he's going to sleep at 5am