this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2025
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Yup. We're humans and when we get tired we make mistakes. I could work a 12 hour day, but in the twelfth hour I'll probably make a mistake that'll take more than 6 hours or to fix someday in the future. If I work 8 hours you get 8 hours of productivity. If I work 12 hours you'll end up getting 6 hours or less of productivity.
The whole thing about making people work long hours is just about bad managers that enjoy exerting power over people. It's not about productivity.
Doctors/nurses/cops/emts/firefighters/pipefitters/welders/fucktard-managers everywhere are gasping in shock and horror.
Just because they work it doesn't make it right.
Not saying it is. Though I do know from the medical field especially that where mistakes are found is in the handoff or shift change, which is one reason it took so long to see any meaningful change in the way residency worked for doctors. Despite the incredibly long hours, the new docs didn't tend to make mistakes in care during the shift. I think long shifts aren't necessarily the problem, it's when we're pushed to keep working when we can actually feel the fatigue and malaise of the day set in. Maybe the only way (right now, due to the way you work or you die) is to mandate shorter shifts, but I would love to see a culture set up where you work until you start to feel it, and then go home or take a break, however long that break needs to be. That's probably fantasy of the highest order, but hey, why not imagine ways where things could like that and push for them?
Medical work and software development are very different kinds of work with very different difficulties.
A lot of medical shift work is about being there, not necessarily about doing stuff all the time. There's a lot of standby-duty. It's sometimes physical work, sometimes emotional/social work, sometimes actual brain work (researching stuff). It's quite a lot of different types of tasks over a shift.
Software develompent is highly-concentrated brain work without meaningful built-in breaks. You spend all day staring at a screen, doing high-level logic non-stop. Humans aren't built for that kind of work at all, so it's really difficult to do that for extended periods.