Why Doesn't Software Show Up in Productivity?
austinvernon.eth.link
Why Doesn't Software Show Up in Productivity?
1–10 of 212 posts
Re: Why Doesn't Software Show Up in Productivity?
#2Interesting read that harkens back to my econ days. I agree with the author based on my experience that digitizing a process often requires the developer to know the system better than the person who operates it - due to the nature of programming. I wonder if AI is really the way to transform software development into a General-Purpose-Technology. Codex is showing the way, in a niche and gimmicky way, but such is the way that many great ideas start. It's really hard to know though if _this is it_ or if it's merely another invention in a long line of inventions that failed to make it.
Sometimes it just seems like we are swimming in a sea of code with no apparent gain. Incredible to think that people managed the construction of Pyramids, Cathedrals and awesome constructions with nothing but papyrus, ink, leather straps and good ol' memory. I can't even remember the function arguments for fs.read!
Re: Why Doesn't Software Show Up in Productivity?
#3Low Code and No Code platforms transform the whole premise though. They do make it easy to "show it how to attach a fastener, then walk away".
Too bad, as developers, we scorn those platforms instead of improving them to the point we'd be obsolete.
Re: Why Doesn't Software Show Up in Productivity?
#4This article makes me think of the woodworker's dilemma. You might start working with cutting, planing, joining and finishing wood because you want to make a chair or end table, and you like the idea of learning to do it yourself, maybe saving some money, or at least getting some extra tools out of the process, and having some pride in your work. But before you know it, you've spent 4 years accumulating tools, but more importantly, getting really good at making jigs, shelves, etc. to organize your tools and make your hobby easier and more enjoyable. In fact, you spend 90% of your time building tools. You do this not because you have to, but because you enjoy it. And because the brain makes it so easy to think of new ways you can use the skills you're building to make more tools in a virtuous cycle.
When you actually build a chair or end table, you complete the project, and you do enjoy the fruits of that labor, but there's no real cycle there. It's just an ending.
Software developers might fall into a similar trap, being so enthralled with building their own tools, writing libraries, designing and implementing frameworks, creating processes like CI/CD that obviously make the whole software development life cycle better... but of course it's largely an internal cycle that's more interesting than a lot of the end results of software that might actually benefit business (and measurable productivity.)
Re: Why Doesn't Software Show Up in Productivity?
#5That is a graph of US TFP. I expect that once Asia is included in the mix the change will be a bit more pronounced. Most of the hardware related change in the IT revolution is happening there. The S&P 500 rank 1 company (Apple) would look to an alien like an Asian company since all the actual manufacturing happens there.
Also, while I don't think it is necessarily the major driving factor, the US has a capital misallocation problem. People keep sinking fortunes into companies with bad profit margins.
Re: Why Doesn't Software Show Up in Productivity?
#6Low Code and No Code platforms transform the whole premise though. They do make it easy to "show it how to attach a fastener, then walk away". Too bad, as developers, we scorn those platforms instead of improving them to the point we'd be obsolete.
But that's exactly what people used to think in the 60s and 70s: instead of requiring a bunch of electrical engineers to build some arcane contraption, now ordinary folks can just write something that almost looks like English and you can automate anything and do calculations in seconds that used to take months! If that didn't pan out even though it seemed so freaking obvious that it would, why will No Code be any different?
Re: Why Doesn't Software Show Up in Productivity?
#7This article makes me think of the woodworker's dilemma. You might start working with cutting, planing, joining and finishing wood because you want to make a chair or end table, and you like the idea of learning to do it yourself, maybe saving some money, or at least getting some extra tools out of the process, and having some pride in your work. But before you know it, you've spent 4 years accumulating tools, but mo…
As a software engineer who loves this type of stuff I’m thrilled someone’s willing to pay me exceptionally well to do it. It’s unfathomable to think of a company having 3-4 woodworking teams each with different shops, tools, jigs etc.
Re: Why Doesn't Software Show Up in Productivity?
#8This article makes me think of the woodworker's dilemma. You might start working with cutting, planing, joining and finishing wood because you want to make a chair or end table, and you like the idea of learning to do it yourself, maybe saving some money, or at least getting some extra tools out of the process, and having some pride in your work. But before you know it, you've spent 4 years accumulating tools, but mo…
Sometimes I feel like the complexity introduced by those tools results in less productivity. When that happens this weird cycle forms where more and more developers are hired to manage the ever changing interfaces used by internal tools which results in more churn.
Re: Why Doesn't Software Show Up in Productivity?
#9Low Code and No Code platforms transform the whole premise though. They do make it easy to "show it how to attach a fastener, then walk away". Too bad, as developers, we scorn those platforms instead of improving them to the point we'd be obsolete.
We are doing that though. There are tons of flexible systems like that, where developers provide components/plugins and somewhat technical people, or rather domain experts fit them together for a specific task. Wordpress, Unity3d, Shopify to name a few.
Re: Why Doesn't Software Show Up in Productivity?
#10>Almost every recent A.I. advance has come from one tiny corner of the field, machine learning. Machine learning exposes a set of connected nodes, known as neural nets, to mass amounts of labeled real-world data in an attempt to give those nodes tacit knowledge. The breakthrough example was software that was able to identify cat pictures.
>So far, these neural nets have given us some great demos but mostly niche real-world applications. We don't have self-driving cars quite yet!
What's the author's threshold for "real-world applications"?
- Google's Youtube algorithm for recommendations uses neural nets[1]. So ~2 billion viewers being affected by it doesn't seem like a "niche" application.
- Google language translation uses neural net[2]
- Apple Siri voice recognition uses neural net
It doesn't seem like neural nets are analogous to the joke that "graphene is the wonder material that can do everything except escape the research lab".
In contrast, deep learning neural nets have escaped the research lab and are widely used in production systems today.
The author's blog post is recently dated August 2021 so it seems like he's not kept up-to-date on this topic since the experimental neural net winning ImageNet in 2012. Yes, that was an artificial contest but things have progressed quickly and there is real-world commercial deployment of NN trained models.
[1] https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...