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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?

#41

Post by lkrubner »

This is why a simplicity of style is something we should celebrate. My best known essay is "Object Oriented Programming Is An Expensive Disaster Which Must End" and I think one reason that essay remains so popular is because there are many of us who feel the way dvanwag feels: that we actually become less productive when weighed down with too many frameworks, too many tools, too many abstractions.

http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/object-oriented-progr...

But it is important to realize that this has nothing to do with time passing. The most expensive failed software project ever was the attempt to the modernize the FAA, in the USA, from 1982 to 1994, a project which cost $3.7 billion and which failed completely. And there, too, the problem was too many tools, too much abstraction, too many experiments with options:

"The project was handed over to human factor pundits, who then drove the design. Requirements became synonymous with preferences. Thousands of labor-months were spent designing, discussing, and demonstrating the possibilities: colors, fonts, overlays, reversals, serpentine lists, toggling, zooming, opaque windows, the list is huge. It was something to see. (Virtually all of the marketing brochures – produced prematurely and in large numbers – sparkled with some rendition or other of the new controller console.) It just wasn’t usable… The cost of what turned out to be a 14-year human factors study did not pay off. Shortly before the project was terminated a controller on the CBS evening news said: “It takes me 12 commands to do what I used to do with one.” I believe he spoke for everyone with common sense."

http://www.smashcompany.com/business/the-worst-software-proj...

So we would be wrong to think that software developers were productive in the past, whereas now they are not productive. But rather, some paradigms of development tend towards too much abstraction, and when followed they lead to failed projects. That was true in the 1980s, and it is true now.

I do think, on the frontend, the desire to take markup languages such as HTML, and then make them work on all output devices (desktop computers, tablets, mobile phones) has lead to an era where too much abstraction is the norm on frontend projects. I tried to imagine an alternative in my essay "The problem with HTML":

http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/the-problem-with-html

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

#42

Post by payne92 »

It's very difficult to say: "productivity" has changed because the "products" that we work toward have changed.

You spend an hour screwing around with a software problem while editing your video, but you're editing 4K shot on a consumer camera, not 8mm black and white film with no sound.

You lose an hour to some stupid router firmware problem, but a 30 min later, you are Facetime-ing with a friend and her new baby (not even possible for most people 10 years ago).

You reboot your phone to clear a weird Wifi problem, but 10 minutes later you're driving straight to the store that has your product in stock, while getting routed around a huge traffic jam. While listening to the radio show (er, podcast) you missed last week.

I think tech is really changing social interactions (and not entirely in a good way), but the time and headaches of life are still there -- they're just further up the abstraction stack.

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

#43

Post by e12e »

I'm 39, and I've never been more productive. I do think there are some challenges today, that stems from more people being productive; we see fewer projects with great, in-depth documentation.

We tend to get decent tutorials, and not very useful machine generated reference material.

Think react vs "the c programming language". Or docker vs the man pages for bsd jails.

I think this makes it harder to fully grasp new technologies - there's often lack of clearly stated vision, or a problem statement (this tools makes x y and z easier with the following trade-off based on experience with a, b and c).

In The case of projects like docker, mongodb and puppet - I think we can blame marketing quite a bit for this.

As for distractions; just turn the stuff off at work, check in your free time. Hopefully as an adult you've formed some real and lasting relashionships; people will be there even if you take a day to get back to them...

[ed: as for that related trend of "keeping up to date" (used to mean reading byte and Dr dobbs etc, then the Web started to dominate with Slashdot, now it's here and reddit etc - I've found I'm much more comfortable taking a step back; the hype isn't interesting - what shakes out is.

It's a sad trend that news in general has become very much tabloid, real news agencies that pay for and do real analysis has been waning for a long time. Thankfully, technology is more powerful than ever, and enables things like the intercept or citizen reporting like http://www.raqqa-sl.com/ ]

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

#44

Post by e12e »

bachmeier wrote: post #31
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…

I believe the only useful think we can teach is how to learn (because you can't teach people, you can only motivate to learn - they need to do the work themselves).

So regardless of your setting (kindergarden through university) - demonstrating good ways to study is worthwhile.

Demanding a classroom free of smartphones / social media is one very basic step in that direction.

You might be the first person to help a student realize that they are still smarter than their smart phone - and that they are in control, not it.

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

#46

Post by gkya »

bitexploder wrote: post #26
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…

That was part of Slack's reason for choosing PHP for their backend. Use a fancy language like Java or Node if you want to do "modern" development. PHP is for getting shit done. https://slack.engineering/taking-php-seriously-cf7a60065329?...

That's a silly blogpost, to be honest. Any language provides what he descirbes under "State" if you run a script through some sort of CGI interface (I'm not very well informed on all the variations like FastCGI or httpd mod_ stuff), which is roughly what PHP is doing too. Many languages (among which PHP too) have some web frameworks written in them which do complicate the applications, but for good: it's easier to write secure applications (at least against the most common attacks out there) with them. And then if you're gonna use PHP with some framework, then why bother the stupid language and not use a more proper one with a nice framework/library?

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

#47

Post by zerostar07 »

There is an overabundance of tools becausd there are less original ideas that can lead to profitable business. In other words people cant stay idle so they made too many tools while researching business. You can browse HN from 10years ago to see that people discussed tools far less.

I think programmers were always equally productive at any time, because their job is to constantly automate the non-productive parts, so sooner rather than later they are eliminated.

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

#48

Post by ehnto »

megaman22 wrote: post #30
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 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? I can, but I still have an old, analog thermostat that I could have had 20 years ago. Just turning the dial every time is, in my experience, much easier than fussing and babysitting a "smart" thermostat.

Imagine every switch in your house was just a screen, you had to swipe to unlock it, and then find the light switch you're standing at in a list of all switches in the house. That would be a nightmare.

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

#49

Post by shortoncash »

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.

The maintainers of package managers and individual packages probably save humanity so many hours and probably are propelling our entire civilization forward in ways they probably don't even comprehend. The days before widespread package managers were really dark and terrible, and arguably the developer dark ages.

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

#50

Post by moosebear »

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…

I recently discovered downloading library books onto phones, have you looked into that?

I live in a city and don’t have enough cash/room for hundreds of books in my apartment and don’t usually have time to reach a library branch. But this way I get/return books instantly and I don’t have to lug anything around on the subway. I read ebooks faster for some reason, too. No way to drop the book in a puddle or pour coffee on it. And finishing a library book on my phone is one of the rare times I feel like I actually used my phone to get something done.

I love tech when it cuts down on the number of objects I need to own or schlep.

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