Comment by LA_Banker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LA_Banker | Hacker News Reader

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Anyone who's worked 80+ hours/week can tell you that work is an efficiency function. At hour 75, one's capable of much less (cognitively and physically) and more prone to mistake than at hour 5 (as the article notes). The stakes are high when it's overworked 20-somethings working on an expensive lawsuit or transactional spreadsheets or trying to ship code on a deadline, to say nothing of engineers and others involved with public safety.

The notion of more work = better isn't as straightforward as you make it. The article itself points out Chernobyl and Challenger as the result of pushing people. Even from a purely competitive, capitalistic POV, pushing people to work more has very real risks; risks that make the expected return negative the harder one pushes.

It is entirely possible that capping the number of hours worked – such that workers are rotated and therefore are always fresh/at their most efficient – is more optimal than driving them harder and harder in the name of competition.

We see this with Olympic/professional athletes whose coaches enforce mandatory rest days and optimal sleep. Certainly these athletes, if they just "worked harder" in the name of competition, would be harming themselves after a point despite putting in more hours.

This recovery period, while mostly physical in nature, also extends into the cognitive realm as well. Knowledge workers need recovery too.

Which is why most professions are settled on 40-hour work week, as the ideal way to extract long-term productivity. If other time arrangements will give more productivity, employers will be eager to adopt it. But it is not the case for e.g. 15 hour work week.

Most occupations are settled on a 40-hour work week, sure, but that's because employers have done the math and determined paying overtime is worse than extending output. They don't cap it at 40 hours/week for optimal productivity; it's for the bottom line.

However, I can think of very few professions which involve a 40-hour work week, given that most professionals are salaried. In The U.S., 60 hours/week is more the norm (not to mention being subservient to email at all hours) and in certain competitive careers, taking vacations is eschewed.

This mentality is silly.

This looks strange to me (I am European). If working for 40h week is more productive than 60h week, why company owners even choose the latter?

It's not that less is more; rather it's that more work has diminishing productivity returns. And, after a certain point, the returns dip negative due to fatigue-related risks (this is a unique example, but it's always major news when the maximum hours allowed for medical residents gets reformed/reduced on account of patient mortality related to doctor fatigue).

And that's just when we limit the scope of "returns" to productivity. As the article points out, there are many, many non-productivity benefits associated with a shorter work week.

I don't think many Americans will be on their death bed lamenting "oh, if only I'd spent more late nights/weekends at the office working on spreadsheets."

Because the marginal cost, to the employer, of hours beyond 40 is zero – remember these employees are almost always paid a salary, i.e. a fixed amount regardless of hours worked (beyond 40). Thus, even if an employee's productivity plummets – but is still above zero – it's in the employer's interest to persuade (or prod) them to work more hours.

But of course even that's a gross simplification. There are lots of 'non-linear' considerations, e.g. burnout.

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