How many times can you ask for it to be redone?

Ask a photographer to reshoot. They reshoot. Ask again: they reshoot, with a different kind of silence. Ask a third time and something shifts in the relationship — even if you are right, even if you are paying. By the fourth, you are no longer asking for quality: in their eyes, you are picking on them. There is a ceiling on how many times you can ask for work to be redone, and that ceiling has nothing to do with whether the work is good. It is social. And it is enormously expensive.

Part I — The cost no spreadsheet shows

1. The revision ceiling

No contract states how many revisions are included. No building code sets how many times the painter may be called back. The limit exists anyway, and everyone knows it by instinct: the first revision is normal, the second is accepted with some effort, the third carries awkwardness, the fourth becomes persecution.

Notice what that produces, because it is subtle and it is the point of this article. It is not that bad work gets accepted. It is that there is a wide band — between “good” and “excellent” — in which you give up. The architect delivered a plan that works but does not delight; the accountant did what was asked, not what was possible; the lawyer wrote the correct brief, not the best one. You look at it, consider asking for another round, calculate the social cost of that, and sign.

The aggregate result of that giving-up is invisible precisely because it is never recorded. There is no accounting line called “quality I stopped demanding so as not to cause embarrassment”. But it is in the final product of almost everything you have ever hired.

And the effect runs both ways, which makes it worse. The person doing the work also knows where the ceiling sits — and, knowing it, calibrates delivery at the point where the client probably will not ask again. It is not dishonesty: it is economising effort in a system where demanding is costly for both sides. “Good enough” is not what people are capable of. It is the equilibrium of a game in which insisting has a price.

2. The tax you pay in tact

Now the second cost, which the manager pays in hours of their own life: saying things.

A mistake that could be explained in one sentence — “this is wrong here, redo it like this” — is not said in one sentence. It is wrapped. You start with praise, soften in the middle, finish with encouragement. You pick the moment, pick the channel, avoid doing it in front of others, postpone to Monday because on Friday the person was having a bad day. There is even a named method for this, the feedback sandwich, taught as technique — which confirms that wrapping is compulsory.

Add up the time. A manager with ten reports spends, weekly, several hours purely on the packaging of what needed to be said. Not on the decision, not on the analysis: on the packaging. Multiply by a year and you have entire weeks of skilled work consumed by the task of communicating without wounding.

And in Brazil that cost has stopped being merely a matter of time. It has become legal and mandatory:

• Law 14.457/2022 requires companies with a workplace safety committee to maintain a whistleblowing channel for moral and sexual harassment, with anonymity guaranteed, and to include the subject in committee training.
• The updated NR-1 regulation (Ministry of Labour Ordinance 1.419/2024) incorporated psychosocial risks into occupational risk management. After a twelve-month extension, the requirement became enforceable from May 2026 — and it does not distinguish by company size: what varies is the complexity of the assessment, not the duty to perform it.
• And there is the liability. Recognised harassment generates compensation, and Brazil’s Supreme Court has ruled that the labour code’s damages schedule is not a ceiling — awards range from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands of reais, according to severity and the defendant’s means.

None of this is unjust. Requiring respect in the workplace is civilisation, and anyone who has lived with a shouting boss knows what the law is protecting. But one must be honest about the arithmetic: the right not to be mistreated has an operational price, and that price is paid in circumlocution, in time, and in quality left undemanded.

3. What fatigue does to a decision

You may be wondering about the employee who is ill, in a bad mood, at the end of the shift or on the eve of holidays. There is a measured answer — and it is graver than intuition suggests, because it was measured in doctors, deciding about cancer.

A study published in JAMA Network Open in 2019 tracked screening orders in primary care by appointment time:

Same disease. Same doctor. Same eligible patient. The difference is the clock. An earlier study, in JAMA Internal Medicine in 2014, found the mirror image: inappropriate antibiotic prescribing for respiratory infection rose as the session advanced — when you are tired, it is easier to give in than to explain why not.

It is called decision fatigue, and the essential point is that it is not a character flaw. It is not laziness, not ill will, and it is not fixed with bonuses or motivational talks. It is biology, and it strikes the most dedicated person on your team exactly as it strikes the most careless. What you hire is not a constant capacity: it is a curve that rises, falls, drops on Friday, vanishes before holidays and returns slowly afterwards.

Part II — The spreadsheet, opened

With the part you feel established, to the part you can add up: what it costs to keep someone, to please them, to lose them. The numbers exist.

4. What it costs to keep

In Brazil, gross salary is the smallest part of the bill. Employer social security contributions (around 28.8% for companies under the main tax regimes), the 8% FGTS severance fund, holiday provision with its constitutional third (11.11%), thirteenth-salary provision (8.33%), termination penalty provision — added to benefits such as transport, meals and health insurance, the total cost usually lands between 70% and 100% above gross pay.

And that is only payroll. Outside it, entering no cost-per-employee spreadsheet at all, sit:

• HR — recruitment, selection, onboarding, appraisal, climate surveys, offboarding.
• Compliance and employment law — internal policy, whistleblowing channel, mandatory training, defending claims.
• Health and safety — examinations, risk management programmes and, since 2026, mapping psychosocial risks.
• Engagement — parties, awards, gifts, internal campaigns, climate surveys, flexible benefits.
• Management time — the most expensive line and the only one never recorded: the manager’s hours spent talking, mediating, motivating, correcting carefully and rephrasing the same request another way.

5. What it costs to lose

According to Gallup, replacing an employee costs between 50% and 200% of the annual salary for the role, depending on seniority — and voluntary turnover consumes, in the United States alone, something close to one trillion dollars a year.

The common error is imagining this is the cost of the job advert. It is not. It is the open vacancy producing zero, the replacement taking six to twelve months to perform like their predecessor, accumulated knowledge walking out of the door, the rest of the team absorbing the overload — and, often, resigning next.

6. What it costs to be present without performing

Here is management’s most underestimated number. Absenteeism — not showing up — is measured by everyone, because it is visible. Presenteeism — being there without performing — is measured by almost nobody, because the person clocked in.

Estimates collected by the Harvard Business Review put the cost of presenteeism at around 150 billion dollars a year in the United States. Per day, absence costs more, because output is zero. In aggregate, presenteeism costs more — because it happens far more often, and because nobody sees it in order to fix it.

And note the trap: policies designed to reduce absence (pressure to attend, docked pay, monitoring) tend to increase presenteeism. You swap a visible cost for an invisible and larger one, and celebrate the indicator.

Part III — Where artificial intelligence comes in

7. What it actually removes

The central observation deserves to be stated precisely: AI does not remove the work. It removes the social friction around the work.

• Revision loses its ceiling. The fifth version costs the same as the first: tokens. It costs no awkwardness, no relationship, and breeds no resentment on the sixth attempt. For the first time, the number of iterations is decided by the quality you want, not by the limit of what you can decently ask for.
• Instruction becomes direct again. “This is wrong, redo it like this” is a complete and sufficient sentence. No preamble, no sandwich, no choosing the moment. The time spent cushioning goes back in your pocket.
• There is no time of day. No eve of holidays, no return from holidays, no Monday, no Friday at 5 p.m., no headache, no argument at home, no decision fatigue. The performance curve is flat — which, after the numbers in section 3, stops being a detail and becomes a difference in quality.
• There is no availability ceiling. At 11 p.m. on a Sunday the marginal cost is the same as 10 a.m. on a Tuesday.

And the gain is not a promise: it was measured in controlled experiments. In the study by Noy and Zhang, published in Science in 2023 with 453 college-educated professionals, task time fell 40% and quality as graded by third parties rose 18% — both at once, which is precisely what rarely happens. In the study by Brynjolfsson, Li and Raymond, with 5,179 support agents, productivity rose 14% on average and 34% among the least experienced.

Hold on to that last cut, because it is what changes the business arithmetic: the gain is largest for those who know least. It is not that AI makes the excellent professional redundant — it barely moves their needle. It is that it brings the beginner closer to the standard of the experienced, and that alters whom you need to hire to deliver a given level.

The dependencies are real: internet up, machine working, account paid, credits available. The irony is worth noting — those are exactly the same conditions whose absence would also delay an employee. The difference is that these fail occasionally, while the human condition fails a little every day.

8. Where it does not come in — and this part is not a courtesy caveat

An article that stopped at the previous section would be selling an expensive illusion. The boundary matters more than the promise:

• It does not sign and does not answer. It holds no bar, engineering, medical or accountancy registration; it is not a defendant, it pays no damages, it cannot be struck off. In anything requiring professional responsibility, the name on the document remains a person’s — and whoever signs must be able to check what they sign.
• It has no relationship with your client. Trust built over fifteen years is not a service you buy by the token.
• It does not know what nobody told it. Half of a veteran’s good work comes from tacit context — what the boss did not say, what that client hates, what went wrong last time. None of that is in the request.
• It errs in a way that is harder to catch. It errs confidently, in plausible format, including by inventing sources. Whoever reviews must understand the subject — which is why it lifts those who know, but does not rescue those who do not.
• HR and compliance are not waste. NR-1 and Law 14.457/2022 exist for reasons anyone who has worked under an abusive boss will recognise. The argument of this text is that the cost should be counted, not that it should be eliminated — and no tool removes a legal obligation.
• Tact also produces something good. A team that respects each other disagrees out loud, flags the error before it gets expensive, and stays. The cost of care buys something real; the problem is when it turns into fear, and fear turns into silence.

The practical rule that follows is short: swapping people for AI where AI cannot reach does not save money — it moves the cost into liability, which arrives later, larger, and with interest.

9. What actually changes

The conclusion is not to fire people. It is to move the boundary of where human effort is spent.

Iteration migrates to the machine: drafting, rewriting, comparing versions, redoing it a fifth time, checking consistency, translating, summarising, testing the counter-argument. What stays with the person is what was always expensive and now becomes visible: judgement, responsibility, relationship and decision.

And there is a side effect almost nobody anticipates, which may be the most valuable: with iteration cheap, the standard rises. You stop accepting “good enough” because asking again has stopped costing awkwardness. You ask for the fifth version, and the fifth version is what the client receives. The advertised gain is in cost; what remains is in quality.

In the end the question in the title has two answers, and the distance between them explains the whole article. With a person: three times, perhaps four, and after that the price is no longer money. With the machine: as many as you need — and the bill comes in tokens, which is the kind of bill you can settle without anyone walking away hurt.