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Comment by jvdh | Hacker News Reader

The best information is at the very end of the report where all the tables and graphs are. They show that munition workers are at peak production at around 50 hours or so. There are many many caveats for drawing conclusions from these results:

  * The collected data is from 1915-1920
  * The collected population is very very small 
    (most sets are less than 50 individuals, one is ~100)
  * The work performed by the population is extremely repetitive manual labor

With these caveats, it is safe to say that most of the audience of HN has nothing to gain from the results of this study.

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Empirically, my best output p/hour will peak with 35h/week. More than 40h/week and I start to feel overworked. I did also manual labour and the feeling wasn't very different. The difference is that instead of feeling mental tired you feel mental bored.

I'll respectfully disagree.

The fact that the data is from 1915 - 1920 does not invalidate it unless you want to suggest that human nature in 1915-1920 is different than it is now - which would seem a strange point to defend. And the sample sizes are quite decent.

I know that the HM userbase had a tendency to dismiss studies that are incorrectly conducted, but I don't think that this is one of those cases.

The life and the work back then is very different from the life and work that we have now. A big factor is that there is no war to motivate people to work hard. Another is that labour circumstances are very very different now than what they were previously.

Finally almost nobody who reads HN does repetitive manual labour. Manual productivity is very different from mental productivity.

From my own experience, I'm not even productive for 40 hours per week. Let alone working 50 hours consistently every week.

"Human nature". Alternatively: People who think the data is not as pertinent today or in other lines of work believe that human behavior is largely determined by context, not a priori hardwired behavior.

Very well put. Hard to extrapolate factory work to office work.

I do believe that there are diminishing returns in software development (and startups) but a lot of it depends on the type of job, stage of company, existing support processes, etc.

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