I don't mean to claim doctors do fine without enough sleep. Doctor friends I have spoken to talk about this talk about the reforms but it is not uniformly positive. I am trying to posit that the claim that we function better with more sleep is true. But that claim is made in a vacuum. Person A operates at 100% well rested. But operating at 80% or 60% is more valuable than 0% if averaged out over time. So I can write better code when I'm well rested, sure. I agree with that. I think everyone logically will. If I have 1000 lines of code to write. And it will take me 10 hours to write it. And I have 2 days to do it. I'll spread it out over 2 days and write good code, and maybe it only end up taking 800 lines of code. But if I have 1 day to write it. I might end up writing 1200 lines of code, but still get it done in that day, it is more valuable to me, than a day later when the code doesn't matter anymore. I'd argue I'd rather a doctor save my life that day, than do a great job and make sure I never scar over two days when the option isn't there.
Medicine is a regulated industry in that the number of people trained almost precisely matches the number of jobs available. The training process is designed to prune out people who cannot function when they have to choose between life saving procedure, and doing the life saving procedure perfectly but losing the patient. It's a straw-man I know, I'm just tired of everyone being absolutely fascinated by this idea that resting is better than not resting. Isn't that just obvious? Does anyone feel like they work better when they are tired? What knowledge are we gaining by these discussions?
Medicine is a regulated industry in that the number of people trained almost precisely matches the number of jobs available. The training process is designed to prune out people who cannot function when they have to choose between life saving procedure, and doing the life saving procedure perfectly but losing the patient. It's a straw-man I know, I'm just tired of everyone being absolutely fascinated by this idea that resting is better than not resting. Isn't that just obvious? Does anyone feel like they work better when they are tired? What knowledge are we gaining by these discussions?