Finance guy here: the productivity in finance has sky rocketed compared to 20 years ago. More computing power means quicker and better decision making. Higher level programming languages has translated into much quicker deliveries of new stuff. Quality tools has reduced a lot the needs of relying on other people.
Ask HN: Were we more productive 10, 15, or 20 years ago?
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Re: Ask HN: Were we more productive 10, 15, or 20 years ago?
#12I felt that I had better tools 10 years ago...
Re: Ask HN: Were we more productive 10, 15, or 20 years ago?
#13What I see is that a lot of people feel the need to always look for new tools and technology to fix their problems, often causing them to get in a big loop of constantly finding new issues and challenges.
My biggest challenge these days if finding the just right amount of "new tools / solutions" that I can get control over, without losing focus on the problem I'm actually solving. I often find myself "too deep down the rabbit hole", and am getting more and more comfortable with just cutting all the "cool new stuff" and find another angle to get things done. 9 out of 10 times you can find a very nice solution within the technology you master, and it's best to ignore that "I need to use cool new stuff"-itch.
Re: Ask HN: Were we more productive 10, 15, or 20 years ago?
#14What I see is that a lot of people feel the need to always look for new tools and technology to fix their problems, often causing them to get in a big loop of constantly finding new issues and challenges. My biggest challenge these days if finding the just right amount of "new tools / solutions" that I can get control over, without losing focus on the problem I'm actually solving. I often find myself "too deep down t…
Kind of forgot the answer the question: Not at all!
The power you have these days over the complete spectrum of software is just magic! You can build a whole new platform / application in days! It's a wonderful time to be in this industry and I love it!
Re: Ask HN: Were we more productive 10, 15, or 20 years ago?
#15Your task is to keep your house at a steady 70F when you're there, and 55F when you're not. Can you do this task more quickly now than you could 20 years ago?
Your task is to assess your bills and financial health, including outstanding balances, account balances, interest rates and dividends returned.
Your task is to determine the weather forecast for this afternoon.
Your task is to turn on your computer and download a full-length film.
Your task is to design, implement and deploy a data-driven application with a web UI. You must find and allocate hosting. The UI must validate user entries and provide feedback.
Can you give some examples of tasks that take longer to do today?
Re: Ask HN: Were we more productive 10, 15, or 20 years ago?
#16I think yes and we were more focused on the task to achieve but on the other hand, computers were dead slower than today's ones. I remember launching tasks for a whole night (for example generating a mandelbrot 720×348 MDA picture near 1984 on IBM PC) and checking the result the following day. Now we can code (IDE with watch mode) and see the result in realtime as we can see on Live Coding session video on YouTube.
Re: Ask HN: Were we more productive 10, 15, or 20 years ago?
#17Your task is to keep your house at a steady 70F when you're there, and 55F when you're not. Can you do this task more quickly now than you could 20 years ago? Your task is to assess your bills and financial health, including outstanding balances, account balances, interest rates and dividends returned. Your task is to determine the weather forecast for this afternoon. Your task is to turn on your computer and downloa…
I think it's more that there's so many distractions now that a lot of people spend the whole day doing practically nothing.
Maybe in the past, it would take a whole night to do taxes. Today it would still take the whole night to do taxes, but three quarters of that time is going down the rabbit hole of googling tax exemptions, etc.
Re: Ask HN: Were we more productive 10, 15, or 20 years ago?
#18No. Git is better, GitHub is better, most package managers for finding things are better, stack overflow is better, help forums are better, tools are often free, cloud access and compute power is better, instructional videos on youtube are better, online classes are better.
I don't want to go back to 10 years ago and definitely not 20 years ago. I have never been more productive than now.
Re: Ask HN: Were we more productive 10, 15, or 20 years ago?
#19Yes, there is a lot more choice and some of those choices are questionable, especially if you aren't working at Google/Facebook scale.
From a productivity point of view you can ignore a lot of it and that is largely what I have done. However if you intend to have a long career in this industry that might not be a good idea.
Re: Ask HN: Were we more productive 10, 15, or 20 years ago?
#20Having dabbled in web development for 15+ years, I feel like there can be a lot of pain involved in getting a dev environment set up and configured correctly for a project these days. But to me it is worth it: the resulting workflow becomes as simple as it used to be in the old days, except there is now much more power and flexibility available to me as I work. I sure hate debugging some BS related to a nested depend…
For me 10-15 years ago just compiling linux and the drivers, fixing the bugs in the drivers, setting up the deb packages correctly, setting up the mailing system, fixing the problems with the cron jobs, trying out WMs that weren't as slow as Gnome, but still usable... took weeks.
Setting up a dev environment is nothing compared to that :)