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Comment by sethammons | Hacker News Reader

An employer often needs to fill slots, yeah. 24 hour coverage and what not. What is unclear to me is why a company cannot hire more people and each person gets fewer hours. Depending on the profits the company takes, it could even keep those who's pay would otherwise be cut at the same pay (unlikely, I know). I can understand needing extra hours as an employee for sure, but it would be nice to have enough pay _and_ enough time to be a person. The single mom who works two or three jobs and never sees her kids; that sucks.

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For the same reason why in most jobs you usually don't work for more employers spread out over your week. Like, 2 hours on Monday for Alice and 3 more for Bob, then Tuesday is your Carol-exclusive day.

Hiring people is costly, and if everybody works fewer hours you need to hire more people to get the same output. More people also means more communication and management overhead. So suddenly changing your scheduling approach is probably net negative in the short term, if other businesses continue with the previous workload.

If most of the population agrees that 5x8 is reasonable work hours, then that's what employers pursue with scheduling. If you pursue to change the status quo (say, 3x8 or 5x6), then you should be ready for people who still think that 5x8 is perfectly reasonable and fine for them so they are going to continue doing it their way. And to the market which may not adjust to lower individual output during a significant part of your lifetime.

Of course it the entire humanity just woken up tomorrow and everybody decided that it is enough to work only 3 days per week and anything more is slavery, then the scheduling will just adjust and more people will be hired to fill the time slots.

> Hiring people is costly

Only for the smallest of businesses. Your commercial rent is costly, your insurance is costly, your materials are costly. People are the least costly resource for any non union (most of world) work. Training is costly, in many cases, granted. Maybe that should be the focus, in the cases where it applies. Saying workers are costly across the board is incorrect.

You are on forum for software engineers. They are hardly cheap.

> (Software Engineers) are hardly cheap.

Their hourly rate isn't the issue. It's about the commitment to fulltime, which SEs often avoid via contracting.

Seriously, where is this "hiring is costly" sentiment coming from? Especially when it's for a job that other people are already doing.

What do you consider hiring costs to be, if you're not including training costs?

You actually see that in healthcare. Many doctors go work for clinic X on mondays and tuesdays, and hospital Y on weds/thursday and they are different companies. Or have a 4x10 hour schedule instead of 5x8.

I think it works with healthcare because it's very shift work friendly. Each customer is a discrete appointment and independent and thus more flexible.

> 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.

Those studies are mostly hot garbage.

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.

Resorts in Mexico are often in rather poor areas. The workers may indeed WANT 80 hour weeks (at their whatever few US dollars an hour). If you only work them 40, they would get half pay - so go work at the neighbor resort for 40 more hours.

Yes, ideally each worker would work half the hours for double the pay, but that is not free to the resort owner.

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