> work is too important to work 12 hour shifts on it

Yes. Because it is know that exhausted people make mistakes. The work is too important to let exhausted people screw it up so you should make sure everyone working on it is well rested.

> your solution is throwing “cheap” grad students at it

Yes? It is testing an electric motor. They can do it. The solution is that you employ enough people so nobody needs to work 12 hour heroic shifts.

That “solution” is nothing more than typical HN backseat driving.

In the real world there are budget, personnel and hiring constraints. You don’t get to hire all the people you want. You make do with what you have, and try to push the mission forward, even in suboptimal conditions.

So we should make every person work 12 hours, then. This 8 hour workday is for the birds, the company has a mission!

Wait until I tell you who's doing work in hospitals and how much they're being paid for it.

Another relevant bit of info from hospital accidents: hand-offs between shifts are known to increase the risk of a mistake in care and are part of the reason nurses and doctors work such long hours.

I avoid, if possible of course, going to the hospital right before a shift change for this very reason.

I'm not questioning your logic here, but how do you keep intimate knowledge of the seasonal vagaries of shift changes at every department of your local hospital?

If you’ve been to that hospital you can easily take note. And most places have a shift change between 5-7am. This one is almost universal, as far as I have observed, even in different countries.

You can probably make a good guess, but at this point I wouldn't be surprised to find websites or Facebook groups dedicated to tracking this information for hospitals in any given area.

Because they’re more or less universal.