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Your thought experiment applies to a very very few jobs. I don't necessarily want a cashier or a postman who has devoted his entire life to their career. Just

Your thought experiment applies to a very very few jobs. I don't necessarily want a cashier or a postman who has devoted his entire life to their career. Just 1-2 days a week is more than enough to be a very proficient cashier or postman. One can even go the other way and say that I don't want a prostitute or truck loader that has devoted their entire life to their profession, for the obvious reason of physical degredation.

gaius 12y ago
It applies to any skilled job, or job in which experience matters or regular practice matters. A straight up cashier no, but a salesman, yes. A waiter no, a sommelier or fromagier, yes. And so on.
- loup-vaillant 12y ago
  Proficiency and mastery come from deliberate practice. Work is often different. I'm a programmer, which I consider a pretty high skilled job, and I'm losing my fucking time in my day job. Granted, I need to practice the craft to keep up. But there is a point where I should stop and just learn. I would learn much faster if I could just use 20% of my work time learning. And no, I can't do it on the weekends. This would be overwork, and I have a life. Doctors are quite special: they deal with several cases a day. They encounter various situations, and their personal experience is by itself statistically significant. To them, more work will mean more data, and better trained instincts. Programmers often work on less than 1 project a year. At that scale, personal experience is mere anecdotal evidence. More work will just mean some more anecdotal evidence. That's not nearly enough data to feed our instinct. Simply put, working full time is a suboptimal way to learn. Now that I think of it, I bet even doctors would benefit from stepping back, and do some directed learning instead of just treating patients.
  - gaius 12y ago
    Most professions do do it. CPD it's called, and it's mandatory. A professional programmer who programs every day is going to spend half an hour every morning getting back into the zone. The same guy working 1 or 2 days a week is going to spend half that time just getting back up to speed on what the other programmers have been doing the other 3 or 4 days he's been away. It just doesn't scale. The 5 day guy is not going to be 5x as productive, but 10-20x.
    - wes-k 12y ago
      This is just not true. Take the new startups offering 4 day work weeks as an example. They feel they are even more productive than their 5day counterparts. The problem in your reasoning is that people gain efficiency when they have time to relax and enjoy themselves. You wouldn't want a dentist that works 10 hours 7 days a week would you? So there must be a threshold here.
      - gaius 12y ago
        How they feel is irrelevant. How profitable they are is the only measure that matters for a commercial enterprise. Anyone can burn through a pile of VC with nothing to show for it at the end... Are they actually producing more? There is no problem with my reasoning, because the world has settled on 35-40 hrs/week as being about the right balance. 100 hours doesn't work; my conjecture is that neither does 10.
        sgift 12y ago
        > How they feel is irrelevant. How profitable they are is the only measure that matters for a commercial enterprise. Anyone can burn through a pile of VC with nothing to show for it at the end... Are they actually producing more? They say yes, you say no. I see no reason to believe your version over theirs. (no, "everyone does it" is neither a proof, nor a reason, it is "that's the way we did it yesterday, that's the way we will do it in the future, why should we change?", the motto of almost every doomed enterprise)
        pessimizer 12y ago
        >There is no problem with my reasoning, because the world has settled on 35-40 hrs/week as being about the right balance. There's a problem with that reasoning, because that number exists only because of Judeo-Christian traditions about the days that begin and end a week, the fact that 8 is a third of 24, the fact that the US had an active labor movement in the early 20th century, and the fact that US-style capitalism has been very influential around the world (largely for military reasons.) Basing a chain of reasoning on the premiss that the status quo is the result of careful calibration over time is abandoning reason at the outset. 100 hours worked just fine, for owners. A few questions about your larger assertion: 1) Could a 2-day a week dentist have a longer career than a 4-day dentist, ultimately leading to a higher saturation of experienced dentists? 2) Do you think that between a 2-day and a 4-day dentist of equivalent experience that one would perform better on an average workday than the other, or would they be equally affected by fatigue? 3) Do you agree that time for reflection and study are a requirement for skill-building, and do you think that there's any evidence pointing to an ideal ratio of reflection to practice that wouldn't advantage the 2-day dentist over the 4-day one?

gaius 12y ago

It applies to any skilled job, or job in which experience matters or regular practice matters. A straight up cashier no, but a salesman, yes. A waiter no, a sommelier or fromagier, yes. And so on.

loup-vaillant 12y ago
Proficiency and mastery come from deliberate practice. Work is often different. I'm a programmer, which I consider a pretty high skilled job, and I'm losing my fucking time in my day job. Granted, I need to practice the craft to keep up. But there is a point where I should stop and just learn. I would learn much faster if I could just use 20% of my work time learning. And no, I can't do it on the weekends. This would be overwork, and I have a life. Doctors are quite special: they deal with several cases a day. They encounter various situations, and their personal experience is by itself statistically significant. To them, more work will mean more data, and better trained instincts. Programmers often work on less than 1 project a year. At that scale, personal experience is mere anecdotal evidence. More work will just mean some more anecdotal evidence. That's not nearly enough data to feed our instinct. Simply put, working full time is a suboptimal way to learn. Now that I think of it, I bet even doctors would benefit from stepping back, and do some directed learning instead of just treating patients.
- gaius 12y ago
  Most professions do do it. CPD it's called, and it's mandatory. A professional programmer who programs every day is going to spend half an hour every morning getting back into the zone. The same guy working 1 or 2 days a week is going to spend half that time just getting back up to speed on what the other programmers have been doing the other 3 or 4 days he's been away. It just doesn't scale. The 5 day guy is not going to be 5x as productive, but 10-20x.
  - wes-k 12y ago
    This is just not true. Take the new startups offering 4 day work weeks as an example. They feel they are even more productive than their 5day counterparts. The problem in your reasoning is that people gain efficiency when they have time to relax and enjoy themselves. You wouldn't want a dentist that works 10 hours 7 days a week would you? So there must be a threshold here.
    - gaius 12y ago
      How they feel is irrelevant. How profitable they are is the only measure that matters for a commercial enterprise. Anyone can burn through a pile of VC with nothing to show for it at the end... Are they actually producing more? There is no problem with my reasoning, because the world has settled on 35-40 hrs/week as being about the right balance. 100 hours doesn't work; my conjecture is that neither does 10.
      - sgift 12y ago
        > How they feel is irrelevant. How profitable they are is the only measure that matters for a commercial enterprise. Anyone can burn through a pile of VC with nothing to show for it at the end... Are they actually producing more? They say yes, you say no. I see no reason to believe your version over theirs. (no, "everyone does it" is neither a proof, nor a reason, it is "that's the way we did it yesterday, that's the way we will do it in the future, why should we change?", the motto of almost every doomed enterprise)
      - pessimizer 12y ago
        >There is no problem with my reasoning, because the world has settled on 35-40 hrs/week as being about the right balance. There's a problem with that reasoning, because that number exists only because of Judeo-Christian traditions about the days that begin and end a week, the fact that 8 is a third of 24, the fact that the US had an active labor movement in the early 20th century, and the fact that US-style capitalism has been very influential around the world (largely for military reasons.) Basing a chain of reasoning on the premiss that the status quo is the result of careful calibration over time is abandoning reason at the outset. 100 hours worked just fine, for owners. A few questions about your larger assertion: 1) Could a 2-day a week dentist have a longer career than a 4-day dentist, ultimately leading to a higher saturation of experienced dentists? 2) Do you think that between a 2-day and a 4-day dentist of equivalent experience that one would perform better on an average workday than the other, or would they be equally affected by fatigue? 3) Do you agree that time for reflection and study are a requirement for skill-building, and do you think that there's any evidence pointing to an ideal ratio of reflection to practice that wouldn't advantage the 2-day dentist over the 4-day one?