Why would you ever allow people to work 12-hour days on something so important? Grad student labour is cheap, surely trying to have one person do the work of two is a false economy.
Health care professionals is a weird one, because while long shifts are dangerous, patient handover is also dangerous and there may be an argument that longer shifts means fewer handovers which could result in better patient outcomes.
Would we accept this if they were dealing with nukes, rather than people? Yeah we let people who haven't had sleep in 36 hours handle the nukes because having the people involved talk to each other between shifts is hard.
They do know roughly how long it takes to take care of a patient & should be set up with overlapping shifts and to be winding down towards a normal shift (i.e. no new patients) so that there's no handoff of a single patient but no one is working long hours. Some patients might take longer than a single shift, but handoff is inevitable at some point. You can improve your handoff processes but you can't improve the decision making of someone working a 12 hour shift.
Maybe but I won't claim to know how to quantify things to evaluate proposals. I do know that even in tech with low stakes, hand off is a problem. I recall hearing teams trying to do 3 on-call teams in 3 different timezones and the team requested to scale back to 2 with longer hours because of the handoff problem (& these hand-offs were occurring daily).
I would prefer fewer patients per doctor then. It seems that the problem is due to the limited supply of doctors. In both countries where I lived, supply of doctors was artificially limited by regulation.
> work is too important to work 12 hour shifts on it
Yes. Because it is know that exhausted people make mistakes. The work is too important to let exhausted people screw it up so you should make sure everyone working on it is well rested.
> your solution is throwing “cheap” grad students at it
Yes? It is testing an electric motor. They can do it. The solution is that you employ enough people so nobody needs to work 12 hour heroic shifts.
That “solution” is nothing more than typical HN backseat driving.
In the real world there are budget, personnel and hiring constraints. You don’t get to hire all the people you want. You make do with what you have, and try to push the mission forward, even in suboptimal conditions.
Another relevant bit of info from hospital accidents: hand-offs between shifts are known to increase the risk of a mistake in care and are part of the reason nurses and doctors work such long hours.
I'm not questioning your logic here, but how do you keep intimate knowledge of the seasonal vagaries of shift changes at every department of your local hospital?
If you’ve been to that hospital you can easily take note. And most places have a shift change between 5-7am. This one is almost universal, as far as I have observed, even in different countries.
You can probably make a good guess, but at this point I wouldn't be surprised to find websites or Facebook groups dedicated to tracking this information for hospitals in any given area.
On your next hospital visit for life-saving care, I'm sure you will be comforted to know that nurses (in the US) typically work 12 hour shifts and they're on their feet the whole time.
Nurses work 3x12 shifts to reduce the number of times patient care is handed off. If everyone worked 8 hour shifts you’d have 3 handoffs per day and a minimum of 3 different people caring for the patient. With 12 hour shifts you have only 2 handoffs per day and can have 2 people trade off on patients if their schedules line up.
I’m sure it varies by location, but my nurse friends only work 3x12, giving them 4 days off per week. Working 12 hour shifts is much more acceptable when you have more days off than days spent working. They’re virtually unavailable on days they work, but then they’re off traveling or having fun for 4 days, some times more if they combine their days off back to back. My close nurse friend routinely takes week long vacations without actually taking any time off at all.
This is true, but IMO doesn't refute the point, it just makes me concerned about care quality. Were there any studies that showed that the long, grueling shifts are actually better or is it simply this way because it's always been that way and change would be hard and expensive, and because "my grandma walked up hill to school both ways, so young people can too"?
Who said it's gruelling? In the case of the rover, it's not year round, it's when they are preparing for a launch. Also, you're on HN, so surely you have heard of flow.
One of the hardest problems in a workplace is coordinating the workers. There's also a substantial overhead cost for every employee. I'm sure workers are less efficient at the end of a 12 hour shift, but shift changes also cost a lot and introduce lots of opportunities for errors.
I am guessing from my personal experience, but for the most part people tend to ask more repetitive technical jobs (like testing motors) to people lower in the ladder, so (relatively) less experienced people are going to touch the parts more.
Then such people are doing the "actual work" and overloaded with tasks, working overtime is a rule rather than the exception. The justification for this is that he was "getting experience" for trying to move up in his career. So all good.
Most people are going to remember that he messed up, rather than that he was working overtime to meet expectations, maybe except for the guy that pat him in his shoulder, he saw enough to understand it.
