Well, it sort of depends on how / where you see yourself and whether you work for yourself. Doctors today work long hours, and teachers are sort of limited by class schedules so their labor organizing has generally focused on better pay / benefits rather than fewer hours, but even for engineers, there's a spectrum from locomotive engineer to Nikola Tesla.

Here are some things I've learned from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day#United_States and linked pages :

- In 1791, carpenters in Philadelphia went on strike against "the prevailing sun-to-sun system, and the 75 hour work week" and fought for a 10-hour day. http://www.red-coral.net/WorkCoops.html

- The International Typographical Union, which had relatively well-off members, went on strike around 1900-ish initially for a 48-hour work week and then for a 40-hour work week. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Typographical_Un...

- In 1907, the US passed the "Hours of Service Act," which limited railroad telegraphers to a 9-hour day. In committee the act was almost going to be a limit to a 12-hour day (i.e., the normal day was longer than that!), until the telegraphers spammed their congresspeople using their telegraphs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Railroad_Telegraphers...

I would say that software engineers, SREs, etc. working IC jobs maintaining large codebases/services at the direction of their bosses in large companies are far closer to the professions that historically have made up the labor movement—carpenters and typesetters and electricians and actors and journalists and composers and telegraph operators and so forth—than they are to the doctor running their own private clinic as their own business.

A quick search for “doctor work week” is returning numbers that start around 50 and go up to 108 for an emergency room surgeon. There is a horrible cultural expectation of crazy amounts of overwork in the US hospital world.

Pretty much every hospital globally.

Its not great for the doctors, but if you're a patient with an acute problem its much better to have the same few doctors working keeping watch over you than a brand new doctor every 8 hours coming on board that doesn't know anything about why you're there.

There's probably a more optimal solution then either a current 8h handoff, or a zombie caring for you.

However, doctoring, as profession, is a conservative one, and is highly resistant to process improvements. It took decades of effort, and decades of trivial mistakes (wrong organs removed, surgical instruments left inside patients when they are sewn up) to get the profession to even consider that maybe, maybe, checklists are a good idea during surgeries.

If someone came up with a process improvement that made patient handoff better, many doctors would resist it out of principle, vanity, or plain-old "I was hazed with 90 hr/week residency, so should every new doctor."

The difference between the safety culture in medicine and the safety culture in aviation is incredible.

I'm assuming it has something to do with the fact that if a plane crashes, the pilot dies. Doctors rarely operate on themselves.

Move fast break things doesn't work so well with medicine though. I heard vets are much more high tech because they wont get sued, probably true.

It's not necessarily a question of tech, or 'let's all jump to adopt this new scrum/agile/extreme doctoring new hotness'.

But I, as a consumer of medicine, would like the profession to spend more time in reviewing its processes, their outcomes, and to not assume that doctors are infallible geniuses, who don't need any of that checklist nonsense. (Oh, hey, the patient just woke up, and told us that we removed the wrong lung...)

> There's probably a more optimal solution then either a current 8h handoff, or a zombie caring for you.

I would imagine that it would involve overlapping shifts so the handoff process can be extended over time.

2 hours shared, 4 hours alone, then 2 hours shared?

The extreme case actually seems good; pair doctoring where shifts start four hours apart, so you spend the first half of your shift with one doctor, and the second half with another.

Maybe instead do 2 x three hours, and give doctors really reasonable work hours or time to keep up on current research.

I fear the conclusion to that would be managers saying "what are all these doctors doing, we need to lay 3/4ths of them off and make the rest work twice as much for 50% more pay!"

Seems dangerous in a medical profession. I certainly start making all kinds of obvious mistakes when tired or overworked, but my web application doesn't hurt anyone.

I read somewhere that the rationale is essentially that more mistakes are made when handing a patient off to another doctor on shift change. Communicating all the necessary information is difficult, context or details can be left out, resulting in larger mistakes being made by the incoming doctor. They think the tradeoff is worthwhile

In terms of a software development, laws/licences requiring maximum workweek hours is kind of pointless. If any company forces their employees to work in those kinds of conditions, they're going to get poor results, and their customers will notice. Software development requires a clear thinking mind, you can only get away with so much before productivity tanks. Manufacturing work is mindless, so they can get away with extra hours without as much decrease in productivity.

Are you basically denying the existence of this problem?