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Comment by dqv | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I hear people propose "radical" ideas about work shifts and weekends, I always wonder how they expect it to work at e.g. nuclear power plants and 911 call centers. Most people, given the opportunity, would opt to take the day off whenever they felt like it and come in and leave work as they please. Creatives seem to propose these ideas as universal, but never give even a passing mention about work that is necessarily shift-based. The handwavy answer is "oh we'll incentivize that" or "oh we'll automate it so they don't have to do shift work!" They should just be honest and say that they want special privileges for work and aren't concerned about putting any further thought into it.

Anyway, this tweet is really someone trying to turn the thought "I don't really like my work schedule"/"Some people don't like their work schedule" into something profound.

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Well, I can say as someone who supports flexible scheduling and has run a team that way it's not so much that I ignored or didn't think about jobs where it didn't work so much as different jobs have different requirements.

I ran a team of software developers, system administrators, and a help desk. The software devs had near complete freedom of scheduling, the sysadmins had a little less, and the help desk had almost none since they needed to be there when the people they were helping were. Everyone had as much flexibility as their job allowed and it worked great. It sucked that the help desk didn't have the flexibility, but they understood why, and I tried to find ways to provide other perks. Plus on the flip side they'd never find themselves trying to resolve an outage at 1 in the morning on a Sunday.

The author says "isn't for everyone", not "is for no one".

Your point about 911 call centers is true, but the principle is just that the work schedule needs to mesh with the job role itself. E.g. restaurants have to be open for meal times, customer service needs to be around when customers are around.

I assumed this argument was restricted those industries that have 9-5 and weekends & holidays off as the status quo: most b2b and some b2c.

I can see how this issue would come up for creatives though. Some jobs have their hours or shifts dictated by the complexities of the profession: for doctors and nurses, handing off patients to new caregivers can be complex and it’d be easy to lose information in the process: the marginal utility of keeping the same person in charge vs the marginal risk that they’re too tired and would make a mistake is something that’s being studied. For creatives, the 9-5 seems to be much more akin to a vestigial organ than a system driven by first principles.

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