Ask HN: Were we more productive 10, 15, or 20 years ago? • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by toomuchtodo » Sun, Mar 11, 2018, 6:42 PM UTC

shortoncash wrote: post #49

greysteil wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+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.

And those package manager maintainers (all the way from distros to software libraries) don’t see a dime of compensation for it, while companies use open source tooling to create enormous valuations. It’s a shame.

We salute you package maintainers!

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

#82

Post by majewsky » Sun, Mar 11, 2018, 7:26 PM UTC

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 just made the decision to subscribe to a weekly printed newspaper instead of fanatically checking the news every day (or sometimes every hour).

I'm one step ahead of you. I'm currently unsubscribing from my weekly printed newspaper to have more time to read books. :)

That said, I can totally recommend to everyone to get your news from a weekly newspaper instead of a daily or hourly medium like TV or the web. A weekly newspaper has just enough distance from the breaking news to provide a good balance between reporting and analysis/commentary.

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

#83

Post by ralphc » Sun, Mar 11, 2018, 7:29 PM UTC

I recently gave a software engineering talk at a high school's career day, and a student asked how the industry has changed, and it caused me to think about this. In a lot of ways I think it's a wash. We could do less with the tools back then but we were expected to do less. In the 80's we had Borland C++ or VC++ to write our text-based screens and BTrieve-based databases on the same machine. The tools have expanded considerably but we're expected to spin up databases, code for them, handle multi-user, multithreaded (or async) coding, GUIs or mobile web-based UIs, use different languages for each part of the puzzle.

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

#84

Post by ghaff » Sun, Mar 11, 2018, 7:30 PM UTC

moosebear wrote: post #79

ghaff wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stu…

>since home ownership is so hard

I don't know the numbers but I doubt that home ownership has ever been all that common among twenty-somethings. And I fully expect that many current twenty-somethings will end up moving out of the city to get more space once they have families. That said, the interest in living in/near the urban cores of certain large cities is a relatively recent phenomenon. When I entered the tech industry in the mid-eighties, almost no one in my local cohort lived in the city (Boston/Cambridge) which indeed was still losing population and tech jobs to suburban/exurban areas.

Although Boston/Cambridge have long been quite good for food, culture, etc., I think it's fair to say that much of that sort of thing has been significantly upleveled over the past 20-30 years.

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

#85

Post by klit79 » Sun, Mar 11, 2018, 7:57 PM UTC

Agile sprint with barely no gap does not help

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

#86

Post by tdeck » Sun, Mar 11, 2018, 9:35 PM UTC

lkrubner wrote: post #41

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.smashcom…

But feeling productive and being productive are not necessarily the same thing. Sometimes I feel really productive at a task (e.g. writing a nested data arser in Bash) with a lot of unnecessary drudge work because I can comfortably plug away at it for a long period of time. But with the drudge work mitigated (e.g. using a real language with a parser framework) I'm left focusing on the hard problems, which causes me to become mentally drained more quickly, procrastinate more, and feel less productive overall.

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

#87

Post by neogodless » Sun, Mar 11, 2018, 11:14 PM UTC

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.

I only have experience with the "not very smart" programmable thermostats, which I adore. I've had one for over a decade with no issues. When I bought another house, it was one of the first things I put in. It's "slightly" easier (lower effort) to program it once and never touch it again (except for "exceptions") then to try to remember each time I move from zone to zone or go to work. Definitely pays for itself in net lower energy (unless you're super diligent yourself, which I am not!)

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

#88

Post by photojosh » Mon, Mar 12, 2018, 12:30 AM UTC

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.

We just moved to a much smaller house. I have 5 boxes, probably 100kg, full of CDs and DVDs that I am ready to get rid of. Don't want to throw them out but rather have them put to a good use (but does anyone use them anymore?).

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

#89

Post by quickthrower2 » Mon, Mar 12, 2018, 1:58 AM UTC

Comparing apples with apples - what we produce today on the WWW and could we have done the same stuff faster 20 years ago? Absolutely not. We are much more productive today. BUT... so it all of the competition, so in terms of winning rat races, no.

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

#90

Post by jorge-fundido » Mon, Mar 12, 2018, 5:04 AM UTC

Yes? I think we get more done in the short-to-mid-term but the fruits of our labor are less likely to survive long-term. There's no value judgement there - there are pro's & con's. At 40 years around the sun, I've got one leg in the "Get off my lawn!" and the other leg in the "Damn, these kids are wicked smart!" camp. I find that people over-focus on the seemingly "attention deficit" critiques of modern day, but even if that is the case, I think it's a small price to pay for having orders of magnitude more people in the space - there will be a lot of failures but there will be more successes relative to prior generations.

If we want to blame younger generations for not "thinking deeper" or "solving the hard problems", then we should shift our focus towards the economic drivers that are favoring quick/quantity over quality. I know how to develop software but if an employer is given the choice of fixing a buggy tool at the cost of maintaining a fork (GASP!) vs spending unbounded man-hours working around said buggy tool, my money's on that they will choose the latter since maintaining tool X is not a core competency. Meanwhile, tool X is hemoraging production data or producing buggy results and nobody flinches.