Why would you ever allow people to work 12-hour days on something so important? Grad student labour is cheap, surely trying to have one person do the work of two is a false economy.
Yes. Because it is know that exhausted people make mistakes. The work is too important to let exhausted people screw it up so you should make sure everyone working on it is well rested.
> your solution is throwing “cheap” grad students at it
Yes? It is testing an electric motor. They can do it. The solution is that you employ enough people so nobody needs to work 12 hour heroic shifts.
In the real world there are budget, personnel and hiring constraints. You don’t get to hire all the people you want. You make do with what you have, and try to push the mission forward, even in suboptimal conditions.
I’m sure it varies by location, but my nurse friends only work 3x12, giving them 4 days off per week. Working 12 hour shifts is much more acceptable when you have more days off than days spent working. They’re virtually unavailable on days they work, but then they’re off traveling or having fun for 4 days, some times more if they combine their days off back to back. My close nurse friend routinely takes week long vacations without actually taking any time off at all.
Sir, this is NASA not Kerbal space program ;)
Then such people are doing the "actual work" and overloaded with tasks, working overtime is a rule rather than the exception. The justification for this is that he was "getting experience" for trying to move up in his career. So all good.
Most people are going to remember that he messed up, rather than that he was working overtime to meet expectations, maybe except for the guy that pat him in his shoulder, he saw enough to understand it.