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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?

#71

Post by saltcured »

swasheck wrote: post #35
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…

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

Compared to 20+ years ago, I think there is more popular appreciation for "meta" and pervasive performance art, which is a definite productivity booster for poets at heart. The technology isn't needed for writing, but it has forged an audience...

You may argue that you asked for "lasting" representation, and today's market is anything but. But, that's in fact part of the beauty and plight.

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

#72

Post by dvddgld »

d--b wrote: post #11

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.

I think this is the reality for most areas, it's never been simpler to actually get projects doing something useful in the wild

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

#73

Post by seer »

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…

Thats great and all, but a lot of those things had their problems and subsequent tools were created to fix them.

- FTP - deploys where one or two files would silently “not deploy” and since there are no automated testing, or error logging, it would sit like that for days until someone finds the issue

- Version control - its great when you’re a solo dev on a project, but once you have more people editting the same project, things begin to break very fast. And god help us if we’ve been editing the same file at the same time.

- SQL - sql injections anyone? Back then the auto exploit tools might have been in their infancy, and you could get away with security vuls sitting in production for years, but not any longer. The script kiddies are real and would find that _one_ place were you forgot to escape the string

- PHP - yeah 2018 php is actually awsome, but back then? If you had to do _anything_ different from just displaying a document site in english, you were in trouble, memory leaks, charecter encodings, image manipulation ... And someone else’s code was so hard to use that if it was not your main framework, or a single class function, it simply wasn’t worth the bother.

And yes I do have projects that were developed back then with those technologies, and are used successfully to this day (deployed by burning on a CD, and travelling to the next town to install it on a solaris box no less :))

I wouldn’t call dev “easier”, it had different problems, which were mostly solved by new tech. If you tried to do it the old way, you’ll run into the same old issues, _on top of_ the new requirements that you’d be very hard pressed to fullfill.

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

#74

Post by raarts »

I am 57. And 40 years in software development. And I would say yes, but with some caveats.

First, the speed with which new frameworks and tools come out, definitely slows things down, because of the need to learn them all over again. Second, part of my past productivity was thanks to me writing on top of what existed. Example: 20 years ago I wrote a new product in PHP/HTML etc. Had both realtime and CRUD. I predicted that in the end it would need a lot of screens, so I started with writing an extensive, data-driven screen library. This was the main reason we could crank out new features like crazy. 2 years ago I picked up Laravel, the 'best of breed' these days, and was surprised that it did not include anything that.

On the other hand, the field has advanced considerably: concepts gaining traction like immutability, functional programming, CI/CD, containerization, really helped moving everything forward. So I'm not an old grumpy greybeard that claims there's nothing new under the sun, and am really exited about a lot of the new stuff. Which I am happy to use.

I started out with mainframe assembler and C, and am now in Elixir, Docker, React Native. Higher level languages really help general productivity. So my answer is yes, we have become more productive.

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

#75

Post by dang »

bsenftner wrote: post #53

I started professionally developing in '82. I'm 52 now. A major part of being an engineer is filtering out the noise generated by the marketing arms of our industry. As tech development grew, the number of available tools and platforms exploded, with an exponential growth in the marketing noise generated by all these tools trying succeed. Since web development "matured", the number of disposable tools and the hype ma…

Could you please not use allcaps for emphasis in HN comments?

This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

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

#77

Post by leetcrew »

jrs95 wrote: post #67
leetcrew wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do you mean "greybeard"? unless the meaning has shifted a lot over time, you probably don't want to call yourself a "neckbeard".

But isn’t calling yourself a neckbeard instead of a greybeard kind of a neckbeard thing to do? Maybe we should just leave it alone? ;)

I mean yeah, but I just don't want the poor fellow going around announcing himself as a neckbeard irl.

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

#78

Post by y4mi »

nickjj wrote: post #34
pasta wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ser…

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

it always irks me when i read a sentence like that.

* if something went wrong, your site would've been down. completely. irrelevent and easy to recover from as a small hobby page, but incredibly expensive if you need to honor a high uptime SLA.

* stateless services that don't need schema migrations are still very easy to upgrade without kubernetes -- or load balancers for that matter.

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

#79

Post by moosebear »

ghaff wrote: post #56
moosebear wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I like to at least think that, if I were starting over today, I'd have a lot less clutter and physical "stuff." I think there's a mindset along the lines of "If I'm going to have a bunch of books, CDs, other stuff that today can all be digitized, then what's another ton or so of physical artifacts to lug around. Not that I would necessarily behave that way but it's at least wishful thinking.

As a godforsaken millennial in the big American city, I do see us spending more on experiences, food, memberships, digital content, locations — things that you can’t touch — than objects. This has implications for the overall productivity of society, maybe? We produce less stuff that goes unused in attics and garages. What we do produce, we’re more likely to consume immediately or scale trivially. So less work on stuff no one will ever use. Maybe. Theory.

It’s purely anecdotal, yes. I think research papers and brand acquisition patterns can substantiate the claims we spend more on fancy food.

It could be our tastes which have been informed by analog and minimalist culture movements which I first noticed in the mid-2000s.

It could also be because we don’t have much disposable income and since home ownership is so hard where the jobs are (big cities) those with money still have nowhere to put stuff.

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

#80

Post by stuaxo »

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…

This description of analysis paralysis is spot on.
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