Can family-friendly workplace policies kill you?

The answer seems to be "yes". At least that seems to be my conclusion from reading the New York TImes piece Are Today’s New Surgeons Unprepared?.

One day I finally gathered the courage to ask him for his “secret.” ... he answered without hesitation. “It’s doing the operations over and over and over again,” he said. He described the hundreds of operations he had participated in during his residency and the final years of training when he felt as if he were “living, breathing and eating surgery. I could have done these operations with my eyes closed,” he said grinning. “And,” he added with a chuckle, “with one hand tied behind my back.”
I thought of his words often over the next few years as I tried to hone my own surgical skills. And recently I was reminded of them once more when I read a recent study in The Annals of Surgery assessing the skills of young surgeons trained after regulations went into place limiting their work hours in the hospital.
For the past decade, in response to increasing pressure from politicians, unions and sleep experts, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, the organization responsible for accrediting American medical and surgical training programs, has been working to cap the hours that residents work.
... And in what may be the starkest proof of the link between experience and proficiency, the failure rates on certifying oral exams administered at the end of residency have almost doubled since the duty hour changes went into effect. While 15 percent of would-be surgeons failed a little under a decade ago, nearly 30 percent fall short on the exams now.

We're talking here about the negative effects on surgeon training from restricting them to working no more than 80 hours per week. Adhering to such limits would mean these new doctors working a mere 20 hours per week MORE than actual hours worked by Chinese sweatshop employees (or 30 more than China's legal limit).

If not working new surgeons more than 80 hours per week has negative consequences for their skills wouldn't you expect similar implications in the business world? I've mentioned before that CEOs work much longer hours on average. One example is Marissa Mayer, now Yahoo CEO, working 100-130 hours per week in the early years of Yahoo and slacking off at a mere 90 hours per week in later years. Those aren't particularly family-friendly hours - 130 hours per week is likely to kill most people excepting a few with the genes needed to permit survival with minimal sleep. Just working 90 hours per week means an average of about 13 hours per day 7 days per week.