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Comment by verylong | Hacker News Reader

We seem to be moving the opposite direction: fewer people working longer hours. It is part a consequence of the fact that there are fixed costs per employee which make it more cost effective to have one employee work 80 hours a week than have 2 employees work 40 hours a week each. It is also the case that more jobs require extensive training, skills and experience that are scarce. I don't society should encourage anyone who spent 20 years learning something useful in school (e.g., surgeons) to work only 6 hours a day ...

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I had this conversation with a person who is studying medicine.

There is obviously a limit to human mental cognition.

The idea that More years studying = better Doctor, has anyone done any conclusive study on this ?

Most doctors will tell you that it would be madness to try to cut the time doctors spend in training - and that we should be extending it. But I fail to see how a single profession could be so much more complex then say quantum physicist.

I think doctors and society would be better off if we reduced the learning curve and figured out how to more effectively distribute the workload among more doctors.

Doctors already have high sucide rates and very low job satisfaction. And I bet its because of how long they work and the stress that comes from taking so much debt throughout one's life. Also the fact that doctors marry latter.

We should try to build work around life rather than the other way round.

It seems absurd to me that doctors need to choose between living their lives and their proffesional career.

> But I fail to see how a single profession could be so much more complex then say quantum physicist.

I am neither a doctor nor a quantum physicist, however, I suspect that having minutes or seconds to make a literal life or death decision does, in fact, require a bit more training than the days or months a physicist could be afforded while designing an experiment or writing a paper.

Except that the vast majority of doctors are not working in an ER. They are running through the flow chart for "how should I treat this child's ear ache". The way medical school works now is like saying that every programmer must understand circuitry in order to write websites.

I don't know if the dire state of your average computer program should be taken as an example for how healthcare could be improved.

Medicine seems to be more of a craft than science. Just like programming. Mastering a complex craft in general is more demanding than recieving M.Sc in physics, IMO.

But I fail to see how a single profession could be so much more complex then say quantum physicist

Because if a quantum physicist fails, all they've done is waste money. If a doctor fails, then you're looking at patients in pain or even dead. Let's say you have a conversation with your doctor and your string theorist: which would you prefer to not be wrong? In medicine, it's difficult to get a do-over. If your surgery ends up in necrotic tissue in your patient's leg, that's it, no more leg. If your quantum physics experiment is wrong... try again. Even finding for the null hypothesis is technically a win.

Also, as someone who has straddled both physics and biology, I find that these kind of comments that downplay the difficulty and complexity of medicine to be patronising. The human body is ridiculously complex; physics ain't the only game in town that needs smart people.

Another metric that fuels this is revenue per employee. It would take a hit if more employees worked less. I think it should change. To help perception metrics like rev per employee, they could simply change many of these metrics to be based off of revenue per work period, which may be a 40 hour block instead, and may have multiple employees perform it.

The problem is costs per employees are high, until health insurance is separated from work (like all other insurance is) then it will be difficult with costs per employee.

I'd love to see a push to change the metric from profit per employee to profit per hour worked. That would be a more fair comparison.

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