> What is unclear to me is why a company cannot hire more people and each person gets fewer hours.
For technical roles, I can think of some downsides. It would presumably mean more employees, each with shallower institutional knowledge, and more general management+communication challenges (think Mythical Man Month).
I'm reminded of the question of whether it's a good idea to overwork junior doctors to the point they're undeniably sleep-deprived (which I understand is standard practice). I believe studies found that although sleep-deprived doctors do get patients killed, it's worse to increase the number of times patients are passed between different doctors.
If you're doing 'stateless' work, like retail, the game changes.
One compares 28 hour shifts to shifts that were 'reduced' to 24 hours, for example. You're going to be zonked long before that, so the change has a fairly small benefit. Handoff is also something could be presumably be fixed with better training and/or technology, whereas sleep deprivation is bumping into fundamental limits of human physiology.
It baffles me that the medical field is so attached to these hours when there's tons of laboratory experiments and real-world data (pilots, long-haul truckers, armed forces, etc) showing people don't do well.
For technical roles, I can think of some downsides. It would presumably mean more employees, each with shallower institutional knowledge, and more general management+communication challenges (think Mythical Man Month).
I'm reminded of the question of whether it's a good idea to overwork junior doctors to the point they're undeniably sleep-deprived (which I understand is standard practice). I believe studies found that although sleep-deprived doctors do get patients killed, it's worse to increase the number of times patients are passed between different doctors.
If you're doing 'stateless' work, like retail, the game changes.