Ronn!Blankenship wrote:
> I don't know about financial models, but I do know that > judgement, especially when immediate judgement on critical > issues is necessary, is affected by fatigue. For one thing, > tired people tend to be grumpy people, and may do things > they later regret.
I think both of us are looking at this issue from a programmer's viewpoint, where long hours usually *are* a sign of poor planning, either by the managers who didn't hire enough people, or on the software engineering side, where time for completing tasks was severely underestimated.
That's true. (I'm sure all here have heard the rule for turning project time estimates into more realistic predictions: multiply the estimate by 2 and change to the next larger time unit, so an estimate of "1 day" is in reality likely to take 2 weeks to complete, and an estimate of "two months" means it is likely to really take four years . . . and I won't even make another reference to "The Mythical Man-Month" . . . )
Actually, though, I wasn't thinking of programming examples when I wrote the earlier message. One profession where many people think fatigue is frequently the cause of serious (too often, fatal) errors is the medical profession. And as far as tired people being grumpy even if they don't want to be, and yelling at the people they really don't want to yell at, just ask any new parent, particularly a first-time parent . . .
-- Ronn! :)
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