Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Were we more productive 10, 15, or 20 years ago?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 100 posts

Re: Ask HN: Were we more productive 10, 15, or 20 years ago?

#31

Post by bachmeier »

grecht wrote: post #24

As a young person who was 11 years old 10 years ago, I can't really answer that question. But I believe that most people don't know how to handle today's distractions, and it takes a toll on their productivity. Growing up in midst of the rise of smartphones, I just now realized how much time I spent staring at a screen, being distracted by the constant flow of information and the constant need to communicate. And I s…

> But I believe that most people don't know how to handle today's distractions, and it takes a toll on their productivity.

When I'm teaching, I'd love to bring a hammer and smash phones students check them. They're doing it as a way to avoid thinking, as a way to always have someone entertain them. They're addicted and don't know it.

> I'd argue that for the most part ActiveBoards resulted in a big productivity loss in schools.

We don't use them here, but not that long ago, "dedicated" teachers used PowerPoint. I've visited universities where they'd put faculty in classrooms where the only way to "teach" was to use PowerPoint. No amount of technology changes the fact that you have to communicate.

Re: Ask HN: Were we more productive 10, 15, or 20 years ago?

#32

Post by Infernal »

muzani wrote: post #17
neogodless wrote: post #15

Your 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.

So presumably you’re able to optimize better given the same amount of time? That feels like a productivity increase to my way of thinking.

Re: Ask HN: Were we more productive 10, 15, or 20 years ago?

#33

Post by simonsarris »

neogodless wrote: post #15

Your 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…

Your task is to write a novel like Moby Dick.

I suspect there are not as many people with the concentration to do so as there used to be. I think that's what OP is getting at.

Re: Ask HN: Were we more productive 10, 15, or 20 years ago?

#34

Post by nickjj »

pasta wrote: post #23
nickjj wrote: post #7

I started programming (mainly web development) about 20 years ago. I think the lack of current day productivity is due to there being so much more input available. 15-20 years ago you were forced to get into the mix of things and try things out because there weren't 800 blog posts and 227 youtube videos on the topic you're trying to learn. Nowadays it's too easy to research yourself to death without trying anything b…

On the other hand: remember cutting out images for rounded borders, using spacer images to align everything, using Javascript for roll over image swaps, GIF for 'transparency'? But I agree for most part. I also have +15jr old PHP sites running. It was like upload and forget. But I'm so glad we now have version control and better IDEs.

Haha yes. Using images for rounded borders was classic. I remember many sleepless nights of trying to do pixel perfect Photoshop to HTML layouts too. Or using many chained   characters to fix spacing issues.

Yeah version control is definitely a win.

I mean, back in the day my idea of testing was to take something like a blog.php file, copy it to blog2.php. Make my changes and upload it to the live production server. Since this new "2" version of the page wasn't linked anywhere I was free to manually test it in privacy.

Then if it worked as expected, I would delete the old blog.php file, rename the blog2.php to blog.php and upload it. That was a "release".

Zero downtime deploys without Kubernetes or load balancers, circa 2003.

Re: Ask HN: Were we more productive 10, 15, or 20 years ago?

#35

Post by swasheck »

neogodless wrote: post #15

Your 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…

Your task is to create a lasting representation of the struggle and beauty and plight of the human race.

Your task is to bring meaningful, sustainable, and relevant hope and quality of life improvement to society.

We can get more low-value tasks per unit of time now, thanks to technology. Unfortunately, there's something of our essential humanity that tech has robbed.

We pay lip service to the fact that tech has made these tasks easier and faster to do and that we are now freed to use more time engaging meaningful life. Instead, we are either so information weary, addicted to tech, or just disconnected from that essence that we don't use this free time well.

We're tired, lazy, disconnected, and addicted. Our ability to think critically across a range of disciplines has been broadly compromised.

So I'd rather just keep my thermostat at 67, balance my ledgers manually, plan for seasonally appropriate weather and adapt to change, go to the theater with my family and/or friends, and maybe write a book.

The only compelling application of technology is synchronizing financial assessments. Otherwise, I think I'd be happier if I wasn't addicted.

Re: Ask HN: Were we more productive 10, 15, or 20 years ago?

#36

Post by jonny_eh »

greysteil wrote: post #21
shortoncash wrote: post #18

No. 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.

+1 for package managers. Hard to imagine programming without them, and they're much better now than 10 years ago.

And ragging on them seems to be a favourite past-time of HN. I'm a huge fan of literally any package manager.

Re: Ask HN: Were we more productive 10, 15, or 20 years ago?

#37

Post by icantdrive55 »

neogodless wrote: post #15

Your 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…

Meeting people was easier years ago--for myself. There was just more out, and they weren't zombies engulfed by their devices. Plus--by watching they way they acted in public (something we monkeys have been doing for a few million years.), you could eliminate a lot of people. (A lot of you will probally disagree on this. I've never used Tinder. I'm just going by Facebook.)

You didn't need to check your bank statements because fraud was very rare. You did need to compare interest rates by looking at a newspaper.

The shit jobs weren't as crafty as today, and there were more of them for a lot of reasons. You were down on your luck, and had to drive a cab, at least you didn't need to buy the cab.

If you did screw up, and heavens forbid broke a municipal law; there was a good chance you would get away with it. We didn't have cameras virtually everywhere.

The only time I really cared about the weather, was when I only had a motorcycle. 90% of the time looking out the window sufficed.

Deploying data a data-driven web application is definetly easier, and learning most subjects is definetly easier.

Re: Ask HN: Were we more productive 10, 15, or 20 years ago?

#38

Post by gdubs »

neogodless wrote: post #15

Your 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…

Robert Gordon wrote a whole book on this (“The Rise and Fall of American Growth”), and I think he’d answer your list by asking if any of those items were as transformative as going from not having electricity, to having electricity; not having indoor plumbing, to having indoor plumbing; not having a clothes washer, to having a clothes washer...

It used to take our family an hour or two to go to the video store, pick out a movie, return home — but we typically had fun doing it.

My dad got some weird pleasure out of owning the thermostat and telling us not to touch it.

Arguably people are better off if they can’t check out their investments all the time, and tax prep seems to suck just as much now as it did back then.

But honestly, yes — our digital tools are generally way faster and more advanced than they were a decade ago. I can do in an hour in Swift what would take me all day in Flash. But I’m also 10X more competent now, so it’s hard to directly compare. And I sure do spend a lot of time making sure I have the right dependencies installed any time I want to try running one of the shiny, new, JavaScript frameworks.

The real question, for me, is how distracted are we? If there have been productivity gains from technological advances, are those improvements undercut by our collective inability to focus on work for meaningful amounts of time?

Re: Ask HN: Were we more productive 10, 15, or 20 years ago?

#39

Post by gkya »

grecht wrote: post #24

As a young person who was 11 years old 10 years ago, I can't really answer that question. But I believe that most people don't know how to handle today's distractions, and it takes a toll on their productivity. Growing up in midst of the rise of smartphones, I just now realized how much time I spent staring at a screen, being distracted by the constant flow of information and the constant need to communicate. And I s…

The hype of making everything digital stems from what I like to call the "oh wow cool" culture. When we see something interesting (and a big wall mounted screen that you can touch and interact, or a watch which can show you the weather is interesting), we tend to not consider its real word implications and usefulness.

Re: Ask HN: Were we more productive 10, 15, or 20 years ago?

#40

Post by tofflos »

We can be more productive but the bar keeps being been raised as our productivity goes up. Customers expect more in terms of non-functional requirements such as usability, performance, maintainability and security. This in turn fuels an arms race in tools and technologies which a lot of developers are struggling to keep up with.

Some of these productivity gains are insignificant but developers have to follow them anyway or risk being left behind. This means we're spending more of our day learning and less of our day developing.

As a developer it has become more important to find a comfort zone with a few well chosen tools and keeping an eye open for incremental improvements.

Post reply on HN