Hacker News Reader

Comment by vfc1 | Hacker News Reader

Companies that have work environments that induce a lot of stress in their employees should pay more to society as opposed to companies that have low stress working environments, probably under the form of a tax of some sort.

It is clearer than ever at this point that high stress causes employees to underperform, and develop chronic physical and mental illnesses.

These diseases will end getting paid by society under one form or another, either by paying unemployment to burned out employees, paying the treatment of chronic illnesses, mental health care, etc.

So nothing fairer that companies that chew people alive and spit them out to become more socially accountable for what they are doing.

Not to mention the huge impact that this has on the stressed employee kids and family, by having to deal with a chronically stressed parent.

These companies are sometimes killing people, literally. They should not be allowed to continue to get away with it like its 1980.

View on HN

I worked an intense amount of hours at a stressful company for about two years before I developed a blister on my retina due to the levels of cortisol in my blood (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_serous_retinopathy). My vision has been permanently damaged due to it. I thought I could power through and "sleep when I'm dead".

Don't do it folks, it's not worth it.

I have exactly same experience. The company and people were not too stressful, but the project and the situation was. It was my first job after graduating, and I was doing most SW alone in a project that, in hindsight, could never quite work due to some technological restraints.

I tried hard to make it work and was stressed often. Not worth... I blame myself mostly for being obsessed about the project, but I wish I would not have been working alone, especially as a newcomer to the field.

The lower hanging fruit might be making high school start later in the day. Kids are chronically under-slept, which leads to higher cortisol levels.

Don't they just go to bed too late ? Only speaking from my school experience, our school started at 7:30am was ok, but I only got to bed at like 11pm'ish - only cause I was fussing+fiddling with my pc. If school started at 10am - I would have gone to bed at like 2am !

There are studies showing the natural sleeping cycle of adolescents is shifted back a few hours from the norm. e.g. https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1196/ann...

Yes, I think one of the keys to improving life for kids and teens is to stop trying to force them into an adult schedule. Their needs differ from those of adults in several other ways, so why wouldn’t that apply to their sleep cycles as well?

Because someone has to drive them (grade 9-10) to school probably

One reason IIRC is that the daily physical cycle for most people shortens as we get older.

Another thing is that the travel times to get to school is quite long in suburban/rural locations. I remember one job I had that had a long commute and I would see kids waiting for the school bus at 7 AM.

Contrast that with my high school, that was a 15 minute walk and didn't start till 8:15. Much less stressful.

> I would see kids waiting for the school bus at 7 AM.

Brutal! Taking this to the extreme - I saw kids in the extremely rural Copper Canyon, Mexico, catching the twice-daily bus at 5am to get to school every day. Though, to be fair they all passed out within minutes, despite the bumpy roads and regular breakdowns. I would be ruined within a week if I had to do it.

It's not just employees that suffer from high stress.

Coming from a family that has a few small businesses (construction, manufacturing, food), I can tell you that prolonged stress will age and exhaust you very quickly and the recovery doesn't always happen (PTSD has a long lasting affect). I remember reading Peter Thiel's book Zero to One (I think it was his book) where he mentioned being on the floor and dry heaving or where he was curled up in a ball crying/freaking out. I couldn't help but laugh because it's more common then you think.

Working for someone can be stressful but you can walk out if you need to.Running your own business and mortgaging your home and family is insanely stressful. Small business people typically have it the worst, it's not for the faint of heart.

This is one thing I thought was nice about the US healthcare system, that it aligns the economic incentives of companies with having healthier employees relative to other companies. Maybe countries that have a more efficient single payer system should nevertheless add a "Healthy Workforce Tax Credit" of some sort?

Does it though? The most I see is mere lip service towards health with things like counting steps competitions and the like. The plans are whittled away each year (whether thats really under or outside the control of the purchasing company), or they just make you pay more and more if you want to include your partner/kids.

People don’t work at jobs for life any more. It’s common for younger people to switch jobs every 2-3 years. In this environment, it makes more business sense to work employees hard because the company doesn’t need to consider long term health. This creates a kind of prisoner’s dilemma where’s its only advantageous to invest in employee’s long term health if other companies do so as well.

I know the former CEO of one of the big U.S. health insurers. He has mentioned that on one side, as a doctor, he wanted to do good for patients long term, but, with shareholders on the other side, it can be very difficult to align incentives for long term health when most plan members will only be plan members for an average of 5-10 years.

>This is one thing I thought was nice about the US healthcare system, that it aligns the economic incentives of companies with having healthier employees relative to other companies.

In what way do companies have an economic interest to have healthier employees?

Heck, in the US they can even just fire them when they get sick.

Heck, in the US they can even just fire them when they get sick.

Well, they could, yes. But wouldn't company counsel advise them to just settle the inevitable lawsuit? (Serious question, BTW; not like this IANAL follows the case law.)

The FMLA covers specific things you may take unpaid leave for and must have your job when you come back.

There are a couple problems with this:

1) It's only for fairly serious conditions. If it's just "I feel like crap all the time because I've been stressed out for years" then in most states they can fire you.

2) It's unclear to me (IANAL as well) if they are required to extend non-pay benefits to you in that time, but I think not. So if they do not extend health insurance to you in that time, then you might be able to come back, but you'll be bankrupt.

If profit is involved, they likely don't.

Premiums reflect the insurers experience with the company.

Some companies self insure and only have the insurance company handle the billing. This provides arm's length from employee's confidential health care.

How would you measure it?

Retention rate might be indicative and/or correlated with stress level. But I am pretty sure there are other ways too.

When using retention rate as a metric, it might also be important to include the reason for leaving as a factor.

For example, software engineers at tech giants might typically leave because they're bored, whereas employees in the Amazon warehouse might leave because they're burnt out and overworked.

Outright measuring cortisol levels would be nearly fool-proof.

So the government should routinely measure hormone levels of almost everyone, and levy fines against employers which will inevitably be passed on to employees or consumers. No thanks.

I think that the risk to one’s privacy is too great. I don’t want the government or my employer to collect biometrics on me.

No, just the opposite. The idea that cortisol levels are a direct indicator of stress levels is a myth. Stress is just one modulator of cortisol levels.

Measuring cortisol is extremely imprecise. Cortisol also has huge variability from one patient to another and depends heavily on time of day relative to a person's circadian rhythm, among other variables.

Cortisol measurements aren't even used clinically outside of conditions which cause extreme excesses or shortages of cortisol. For example, Cushing's syndrome or Addison's disease.

Consider that the reference range for morning plasma free cortisol has a lower limit of 5 ug/dL and an upper limit of 25 ug/dL. Obviously, you can't draw any conclusions about one's workplace stress if the morning reference range in normal, healthy volunteers already spans a 5X range.

Finally, the idea that cortisol == bad is just wrong. Cortisol is just one marker of a complex system. If you're in a stressful situation, you want your body to react with an appropriate amount of cortisol to help you deal with it. Cortisol only becomes problematic when stress is chronic day and night, or when your natural cortisol feedback mechanisms are degraded as might be the case in major depressive disorder.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com