@jaror You may be missing an important point about the Patriarchy here, though.

Wizards staying up late is not all about bad work-life balance. That's a relatively recent development, for some stupid reasons that you're probably aware of.

In general, the sort of people who are good at programming have great enthusiasm for it. With great enthusiasm tends to come a period of life of intense practice, and one of the ways this has, in the Western cultures of about the last sixty years or so, manifested itself is, well, staying up late.

A part of the equation is, being good at creative programming tends to correlate with having the sort of neurotype that often comes with what's nowadays called the Delayed Sleep Phase "Syndrome".

There's a sexist part to it, too, of course.

Your point is valid, too. Just because one has done all-nighters to search for bugs for fun doesn't mean that it's a good idea to do the same for money. The recent idea of corporate "hackathons" is basically a cargo cult version of the genuine article. But having had a night-time experience with this stuff is, for Western AMAB people, currently still a moderately useful proxy for experience with programming enthusiasm, and thus, for programming skill. It tends to not be as useful for AFAB people — Western cultures have, in the relevant decades, more strongly forced diurnal living on young AFAB than AMAB folks, so while AFAB hackers often have had comparable experiences, they are significantly more likely to have happened outside night-time. But #ADHD, #autism, and #DSPS are still factors.

@JacquesC2