8 ms·

Defects are inherent to anything involving human labor. You can't expect workers on 12hr shifts to have consistent high quality of throughput. It has nothing to

Defects are inherent to anything involving human labor. You can't expect workers on 12hr shifts to have consistent high quality of throughput. It has nothing to do with expansion and more to do with people just getting lazy or negligent throughout the day.

FiberBundle 2y ago
Maybe not let people work 12 hour shifts? This isn't the 19th century.
- jajko 2y ago
  But we talk about Musk, who is absolutely clear how he views workers and at this point we know how he treats them too (and himself, which is a textbook example of unhealthy obsessive behavior among other unhealthy stuff coming from high performing broken mind). He makes it trivial to have a love/hate 'relationship' with him, for better or worse. Fun to watch from the distance, just not grokking all those early adopters. I have small kids, there are risks I take also with them but they are always calculated and control is on our side. This is just blindly trusting some startup mentality scales well into giga factories level.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  Some people like 12 hour shifts? You make more money and your commuting expense per hour of work goes down. The alternative is that someone who wants to make more money takes a second job somewhere else. Then they're working 16 hours a day and have two commutes. What does 16 hours of work and 6 hours of sleep do for quality?
  - pixiemaster 2y ago
    how about 7hour shifts and enough pay to sustain a family with that?
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      How about two hour shifts that pay a million dollars an hour? You can't change the market rate for that kind of labor by magic; employers are operating in a competitive market. You can get more money by working more hours.
      - jjav 2y ago
        > employers are operating in a competitive market Let's see; Musk is demanding that the board give him a 56B pay package. Tesla seems to have about 130K employees. They could afford to give every employee a 400K raise and Musk still gets a fortune from the left over money. So money doesn't seem to be very tight there, it's just that greed demands that a single person gets it all.
        FiberBundle 2y ago
        The shareholders would pay for Musk's pay package by having their shares diluted. It's not as if Tesla has to provide any money for that, so it's not really comparable to giving employees a raise.
        AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        Money is money. In theory they could dilute the shareholders by issuing new shares into the market and use the money to pay employees more. But this fails to identify what magic is to be used to cause them to want to do that. Employers (and employees) generally have a pretty good idea what the market price is for a particular job. If they have to fill 100 positions and offering $25/hour causes them to get 100 qualified applicants who accept the position, they could offer $35/hour, but this is like saying that the employees could accept $15/hour when another employer is offering $25. Some explanation is required for why they would.
        jjav 2y ago
        > so it's not really comparable to giving employees a raise Employees can (and most often are) paid in those company shares as well, so no difference.
  - gopher_space 2y ago
    Have you ever worked a 12 hour shift? Ever worked 4 10s? You know how you’re mentally checked out of a job after 4 to 6 hours? That doesn’t get better after 8. A 12 hour shift means you’re in a bit of a mental fog half the day.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      It depends what kind of work it is, and what kind of shape you're in. Some people have more endurance than others. If you're not capable of doing some work, you can do other work; that's no reason to say that someone who is capable of it should be deprived of the income.
      - askonomm 2y ago
        So because someone can take more of a beating than I can, it makes it somehow okay?
        AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        If someone is capable of doing work, and wants to because they'd make more money, what right do you have to prohibit them from doing it just because you can't?
      - gopher_space 2y ago
        What kind of work are you imagining where there's no brainwork involved and no danger to the project or other employees if a tired worker makes mistakes? I think you're operating on too many hypotheticals and not quite enough personal experience.
        AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        Many types of manufacturing. If you're making e.g. textiles, and being tired means you occasionally produce something that gets tossed out by quality control, this is not obviously a danger to anyone so it's just a cost trade off in wasted material vs. benefits of operating the factory for longer hours. Many types of emergency response or on-call work. You just got off an 8 hour shift when an emergency happens. The cost of mistakes you make from being tired can be less than the cost of waiting 16 hours before responding to the emergency or leaving it to someone unqualified. Generically anything where the cost of occasional mistakes is low or they can be detected before they have a major impact. But also, the point is that different people have different levels of endurance. Some people will be making more mistakes after 6 hours than someone else would be making after 12.
  - slowhadoken 2y ago
    I wouldn’t have believed this when I was a teenager but as an adult I know it to be true. I’ve worked with guys who knock out 10 hour days everyday with an hour commute to and from work. I could only keep it up for three months at a time but immigrants and guys fresh out of the military are machines.
  - asa400 2y ago
    A bunch of people think they're good at working 12 hour shifts. Almost none of them are. There is an absolute mountain of fatigue research that bears this out. Truck drivers and pilots are legally prohibited from working more than a certain amount of hours in a given period because if their performance suffers, people die. Personally, I'd prefer the same apply to whoever happens to be installing the accelerator pedal on my car. Sure, you can let people work as many hours as they possibly want, you're just making a decision that someone other than those workers and the companies that employ them is going to pay the externalities for all of their quality deficiencies. We have hour restrictions because people can't consent to being killed by a tired truck driver.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      > There is an absolute mountain of fatigue research that bears this out. Any kind of sound research is going to conclude that a physically fit and healthy person has more endurance than a sickly and out of shape person. The former can work more hours than the latter in actual fact. > Truck drivers and pilots are legally prohibited from working more than a certain amount of hours in a given period because if their performance suffers, people die. Truck drivers and pilots are legally prohibited from working more than a certain number of hours because some of them are sickly and out of shape, if those ones were to work 12 hour shifts then people would die, and that provides a convenient excuse for their lobbyists to demand rules that reduce the labor supply.
      - asa400 2y ago
        It's a truism to say healthy people are healthier than unhealthy people. Of course they are. The point isn't that healthy people can work more than unhealthy people, it's that all people - even healthy people, even young people, even experts - have a much lower tolerance for stress and fatigue than they think they do, and their performance at the limit degrades quickly.
        AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        The issue is that the limit is in a different place for different people. One person's performance is degraded by hour 6 as much as another's is by hour 10, so it makes no sense to limit them both to 8 hours -- the first presumably shouldn't even be working 6. There is also the question of where to stop. Suppose that the average person's performance is degraded by 5% after 4 hours. Should everyone stop after 4 hours then? They're not at peak performance anymore. But 95% is often good enough. And maybe 90% is good enough. Maybe 80% is good enough. Maybe 75% is good enough and one person is at 75% after 8 hours. Maybe only 90% is good enough but it's a different kind of work and then the same person is still at 90% after 14 hours. Maybe you're at 85% after 8 hours but get back to 90% with a cup of coffee. There is no one size fits all.
- sonicanatidae 2y ago
  That's gonna be tougher when they just fired 10% of the work force.
Libcat99 2y ago
Those lazy employees and their 12 hour shifts... If long shifts impact production quality (and they do) run shorter shifts.
- Freedom2 2y ago
  YC startup founders work longer than 12 hour shifts all the time...
  - stonogo 2y ago
    YC startup founders do not work shifts.
    - gopher_space 2y ago
      Startup founders spend a lot of time on their project and it can be hard to do, but I don’t think I’d label the effort “work” for the same reasons I don’t think of home improvements as a duty or chore.
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    1. They talk about doing this a whole lot more than they actually do it 2. "I worked twelve hours today [not including unlimited bathroom breaks, social breaks, snack breaks, drink breaks, YouTube breaks, going on a walk to clear my head breaks]" 3. To the extent that anyone actually does this with any consistency, it's a laughable example of poor self-management and company leadership 4. It's an example of poor self-management and leadership for the same reason it's bad on assembly lines: it produces bad work 5. They're not building safety-critical devices they're putting out onto public roads
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - littlestymaar 2y ago
    Haven't done YC but did Techstars a while back when they were still in the same league, and except on the week before demo day there was pretty much never anyone at the place after 6pm (except for the handful of foreign teams who didn't have anything do to in their life in the US).
JohnFen 2y ago
True, but I was talking about a change in the rate of defects. If rapid expansion is causing a greater number of defects than is normal, then something about that expansion is likely the root cause. In the big picture, of course, everything has defects.
Draiken 2y ago
> You can't expect workers on 12hr shifts to have consistent high quality of throughput. Nor should we. We should expect the company to prioritize safety and hire more people to avoid such mistakes. Or even if you want to keep that awful 12h shift practice, at the very least have good procedures and quality control to ensure failures from those "lazy" workers don't leave the factory.
- FloatArtifact 2y ago
  Umm manufacturing, think of healthcare. It's not uncommon for inpatient nursing to do 12-hour shifts and doctors do seven of days/nights of 12-hour shifts.

FiberBundle 2y ago

Maybe not let people work 12 hour shifts? This isn't the 19th century.

jajko 2y ago
But we talk about Musk, who is absolutely clear how he views workers and at this point we know how he treats them too (and himself, which is a textbook example of unhealthy obsessive behavior among other unhealthy stuff coming from high performing broken mind). He makes it trivial to have a love/hate 'relationship' with him, for better or worse. Fun to watch from the distance, just not grokking all those early adopters. I have small kids, there are risks I take also with them but they are always calculated and control is on our side. This is just blindly trusting some startup mentality scales well into giga factories level.
AnthonyMouse 2y ago
Some people like 12 hour shifts? You make more money and your commuting expense per hour of work goes down. The alternative is that someone who wants to make more money takes a second job somewhere else. Then they're working 16 hours a day and have two commutes. What does 16 hours of work and 6 hours of sleep do for quality?
- pixiemaster 2y ago
  how about 7hour shifts and enough pay to sustain a family with that?
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    How about two hour shifts that pay a million dollars an hour? You can't change the market rate for that kind of labor by magic; employers are operating in a competitive market. You can get more money by working more hours.
    - jjav 2y ago
      > employers are operating in a competitive market Let's see; Musk is demanding that the board give him a 56B pay package. Tesla seems to have about 130K employees. They could afford to give every employee a 400K raise and Musk still gets a fortune from the left over money. So money doesn't seem to be very tight there, it's just that greed demands that a single person gets it all.
      - FiberBundle 2y ago
        The shareholders would pay for Musk's pay package by having their shares diluted. It's not as if Tesla has to provide any money for that, so it's not really comparable to giving employees a raise.
        AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        Money is money. In theory they could dilute the shareholders by issuing new shares into the market and use the money to pay employees more. But this fails to identify what magic is to be used to cause them to want to do that. Employers (and employees) generally have a pretty good idea what the market price is for a particular job. If they have to fill 100 positions and offering $25/hour causes them to get 100 qualified applicants who accept the position, they could offer $35/hour, but this is like saying that the employees could accept $15/hour when another employer is offering $25. Some explanation is required for why they would.
        jjav 2y ago
        > so it's not really comparable to giving employees a raise Employees can (and most often are) paid in those company shares as well, so no difference.
- gopher_space 2y ago
  Have you ever worked a 12 hour shift? Ever worked 4 10s? You know how you’re mentally checked out of a job after 4 to 6 hours? That doesn’t get better after 8. A 12 hour shift means you’re in a bit of a mental fog half the day.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    It depends what kind of work it is, and what kind of shape you're in. Some people have more endurance than others. If you're not capable of doing some work, you can do other work; that's no reason to say that someone who is capable of it should be deprived of the income.
    - askonomm 2y ago
      So because someone can take more of a beating than I can, it makes it somehow okay?
      - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        If someone is capable of doing work, and wants to because they'd make more money, what right do you have to prohibit them from doing it just because you can't?
    - gopher_space 2y ago
      What kind of work are you imagining where there's no brainwork involved and no danger to the project or other employees if a tired worker makes mistakes? I think you're operating on too many hypotheticals and not quite enough personal experience.
      - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        Many types of manufacturing. If you're making e.g. textiles, and being tired means you occasionally produce something that gets tossed out by quality control, this is not obviously a danger to anyone so it's just a cost trade off in wasted material vs. benefits of operating the factory for longer hours. Many types of emergency response or on-call work. You just got off an 8 hour shift when an emergency happens. The cost of mistakes you make from being tired can be less than the cost of waiting 16 hours before responding to the emergency or leaving it to someone unqualified. Generically anything where the cost of occasional mistakes is low or they can be detected before they have a major impact. But also, the point is that different people have different levels of endurance. Some people will be making more mistakes after 6 hours than someone else would be making after 12.
- slowhadoken 2y ago
  I wouldn’t have believed this when I was a teenager but as an adult I know it to be true. I’ve worked with guys who knock out 10 hour days everyday with an hour commute to and from work. I could only keep it up for three months at a time but immigrants and guys fresh out of the military are machines.
- asa400 2y ago
  A bunch of people think they're good at working 12 hour shifts. Almost none of them are. There is an absolute mountain of fatigue research that bears this out. Truck drivers and pilots are legally prohibited from working more than a certain amount of hours in a given period because if their performance suffers, people die. Personally, I'd prefer the same apply to whoever happens to be installing the accelerator pedal on my car. Sure, you can let people work as many hours as they possibly want, you're just making a decision that someone other than those workers and the companies that employ them is going to pay the externalities for all of their quality deficiencies. We have hour restrictions because people can't consent to being killed by a tired truck driver.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    > There is an absolute mountain of fatigue research that bears this out. Any kind of sound research is going to conclude that a physically fit and healthy person has more endurance than a sickly and out of shape person. The former can work more hours than the latter in actual fact. > Truck drivers and pilots are legally prohibited from working more than a certain amount of hours in a given period because if their performance suffers, people die. Truck drivers and pilots are legally prohibited from working more than a certain number of hours because some of them are sickly and out of shape, if those ones were to work 12 hour shifts then people would die, and that provides a convenient excuse for their lobbyists to demand rules that reduce the labor supply.
    - asa400 2y ago
      It's a truism to say healthy people are healthier than unhealthy people. Of course they are. The point isn't that healthy people can work more than unhealthy people, it's that all people - even healthy people, even young people, even experts - have a much lower tolerance for stress and fatigue than they think they do, and their performance at the limit degrades quickly.
      - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        The issue is that the limit is in a different place for different people. One person's performance is degraded by hour 6 as much as another's is by hour 10, so it makes no sense to limit them both to 8 hours -- the first presumably shouldn't even be working 6. There is also the question of where to stop. Suppose that the average person's performance is degraded by 5% after 4 hours. Should everyone stop after 4 hours then? They're not at peak performance anymore. But 95% is often good enough. And maybe 90% is good enough. Maybe 80% is good enough. Maybe 75% is good enough and one person is at 75% after 8 hours. Maybe only 90% is good enough but it's a different kind of work and then the same person is still at 90% after 14 hours. Maybe you're at 85% after 8 hours but get back to 90% with a cup of coffee. There is no one size fits all.
sonicanatidae 2y ago
That's gonna be tougher when they just fired 10% of the work force.

Libcat99 2y ago

Those lazy employees and their 12 hour shifts... If long shifts impact production quality (and they do) run shorter shifts.

Freedom2 2y ago
YC startup founders work longer than 12 hour shifts all the time...
- stonogo 2y ago
  YC startup founders do not work shifts.
  - gopher_space 2y ago
    Startup founders spend a lot of time on their project and it can be hard to do, but I don’t think I’d label the effort “work” for the same reasons I don’t think of home improvements as a duty or chore.
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  1. They talk about doing this a whole lot more than they actually do it 2. "I worked twelve hours today [not including unlimited bathroom breaks, social breaks, snack breaks, drink breaks, YouTube breaks, going on a walk to clear my head breaks]" 3. To the extent that anyone actually does this with any consistency, it's a laughable example of poor self-management and company leadership 4. It's an example of poor self-management and leadership for the same reason it's bad on assembly lines: it produces bad work 5. They're not building safety-critical devices they're putting out onto public roads
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- littlestymaar 2y ago
  Haven't done YC but did Techstars a while back when they were still in the same league, and except on the week before demo day there was pretty much never anyone at the place after 6pm (except for the handful of foreign teams who didn't have anything do to in their life in the US).

JohnFen 2y ago

True, but I was talking about a change in the rate of defects. If rapid expansion is causing a greater number of defects than is normal, then something about that expansion is likely the root cause. In the big picture, of course, everything has defects.

Draiken 2y ago

> You can't expect workers on 12hr shifts to have consistent high quality of throughput. Nor should we. We should expect the company to prioritize safety and hire more people to avoid such mistakes. Or even if you want to keep that awful 12h shift practice, at the very least have good procedures and quality control to ensure failures from those "lazy" workers don't leave the factory.

FloatArtifact 2y ago
Umm manufacturing, think of healthcare. It's not uncommon for inpatient nursing to do 12-hour shifts and doctors do seven of days/nights of 12-hour shifts.