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Why Doesn't Software Show Up in Productivity?

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Re: Why Doesn't Software Show Up in Productivity?

#121

Post by gred »

dalbasal wrote: post #31

Extremely worthwhile question, long overdue. Productivity, especially in relevant areas like administration, stagnated despite computers hitting every desk. I read the Cowen book (Complacent Class) at the same time I was reader Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs." Heterodox writers from both sides of the spectrum. Same observation. On the face of it, it doesn't make sense. How could, for example, a local college's administrati…

> Productivity, especially in relevant areas like administration, stagnated despite computers hitting every desk.

I don't know if this has been quantified, but to some extent the extra capability is simply repurposed to more detailed administration. Things that were not possible become possible. Things that we did not have time for, we suddenly have time to do. Per Parkinson, "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion".

An example would be logistics within the US -- at some point, probably after 9/11 or a similar event, it was decided that all packages flying in commercial airlines within the US needed to be vouched for by entities known to the US government, the individual packages tracked at a more detailed level, etc. This would not have been possible without automation throughout the industry, and definitely "soaked up" some of the productivity benefits of this automation.

I'm sure there are endless other examples.

Re: Why Doesn't Software Show Up in Productivity?

#122

Post by cxr »

dalbasal wrote: post #31

Extremely worthwhile question, long overdue. Productivity, especially in relevant areas like administration, stagnated despite computers hitting every desk. I read the Cowen book (Complacent Class) at the same time I was reader Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs." Heterodox writers from both sides of the spectrum. Same observation. On the face of it, it doesn't make sense. How could, for example, a local college's administrati…

> A factory's productivity, which has legible inputs and outputs is really different to something which doesn't.

I've worked in the semiconductor industry, and the situation is just as bad over there, if not worse.

To the common capitalist's credit, this absolutely has to do with lack of competition (not necessarily due to regulation, but because the cost of the ticket to get in—capital to build and operate a fab—is so high). Under something more Taylor-esque, 2x productivity is on the low end of what I'd expect a contender to be able to operate at, relative to the clip that the small pool of incumbents move at. The main sources of inefficiency based on what I observed 2014–2020 are either people problems or process problems that call for technical solution that doesn't look anything like materials science, chemistry, physics, etc. (Elite overproduction ⨯ poorly trained/selected workforce + terrible, absolutely godawful software supporting the whole operation; bullshit jobs abound.)

Re: Why Doesn't Software Show Up in Productivity?

#123

Post by carbonguy »

bildung wrote: post #20
stdbrouw wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

To add an anecdote: No Code already was the hot new thing in the 90s when I studied CS. You could click together custom interfaces in Delphi and even do basic wiring with clicking alone, IIRC. Devs expected that laypeople click together the solution they want and developers do the remaining wiring. Yet no non-developer could actually use that thing. Nowadays I think the main hurdle is the transformation of a fluffy r…

> I think the main hurdle is the transformation of a fluffy real world problem into something of an algorithm.

I came to a very similar conclusion after I had been teaching programming in high school for a few years: the difficulty of "programming" is in learning to think algorithmically, and no amount of "No Code" tooling gets you around that problem. The article alludes to this with the "PBJ sandwich problem" - people are used to specifying processes based on a collective (and often unconscious) cultural understanding, which computers obviously do not share!

Re: Why Doesn't Software Show Up in Productivity?

#124

Post by ThrustVectoring »

dalbasal wrote: post #31

Extremely worthwhile question, long overdue. Productivity, especially in relevant areas like administration, stagnated despite computers hitting every desk. I read the Cowen book (Complacent Class) at the same time I was reader Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs." Heterodox writers from both sides of the spectrum. Same observation. On the face of it, it doesn't make sense. How could, for example, a local college's administrati…

IMO the biggest "improvement" that this sort of clerical "productivity" generates is that the same workforce can keep up with inflicting even more inane bureaucratic demands on the people forced to interact with it.

Re: Why Doesn't Software Show Up in Productivity?

#125

Post by kazinator »

Software is mostly a management technology. But there is all sorts of automation: CNC machines, industrial robots making stuff.

I think that a graph of "total factor productivity in the USA" is misleading without looking at factors like, say, how much manufacturing has disappeared from the USA and gone overseas in that period!"

You have to look at how much you're producing with how many people; and that cannot be some per capita based on the population, but the actual head counts in those industries that are covered by that graph: what is the productivity with how many people?

Re: Why Doesn't Software Show Up in Productivity?

#126

Post by robertlagrant »

tsimionescu wrote: post #93
heisgone wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is all true. That being said, it's not completely a bad thing. We have to accept that different people are motivated by different things. To run a business, you need both people motivated by money and people motivated by building things. People only motivated by money we work in marketing and management but don't have the mindset necessary to build the stuff they want to sell. So you get people motivated by buil…

But can you imagine how much better the world would be if we didn't run businesses and didn't need the people motivated only by money at all?

Not any better? The allocation of finite resources is best done with money.

Re: Why Doesn't Software Show Up in Productivity?

#127

Post by WalterBright »

hvs wrote: post #32
neogodless wrote: post #4

This 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…

A few nits to pick as a woodworker: 1) You never save money building it yourself (at least not in comparison to a standard consumer option, like a chair or table from your local furniture store. This may hold up if you compare what you build to high-end hardwood furniture. But with the cost of tools, you're probably still losing money if this is just a hobby) 2) 90% of my enjoyment of woodworking is just being in my…

I built my dream workbench. The commercial ones were too light. I wanted one that was 8 feet long, and 4 deep, that I could bolt a big vise to, and whale away at whatever was in the vise without the bench scittering across the floor.

It is build entirely from 4x4s for the legs, 2x4s for the rest of the frame, and 1x8 planks for the top and shelf. It's all held together with carriage bolts so it can be disassembled, and the top can be replaced. No plywood or glued sawdust.

It only took an hour or so to put together. Very happy with it. I later installed wall sockets in the front so power cords needn't be draped over the top.

The only problem was drilling the bolt holes perpendicular. I later acquired a drill press to solve that.

Re: Why Doesn't Software Show Up in Productivity?

#128

Post by analog31 »

bluGill wrote: post #47
dalbasal wrote: post #31

Extremely worthwhile question, long overdue. Productivity, especially in relevant areas like administration, stagnated despite computers hitting every desk. I read the Cowen book (Complacent Class) at the same time I was reader Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs." Heterodox writers from both sides of the spectrum. Same observation. On the face of it, it doesn't make sense. How could, for example, a local college's administrati…

Prevented waste is a lot of it. Factories used to produce full on until inventory built up too much, and then they did clearance sales to empty it, or sometimes sent it right to a landfill. Now with just in time there is less produced than before, but it is only produced as needed, so the total produced is less, but what is produced is what is needed.

In practice just in time means that the vendor carries the inventory. Or the customer.

Re: Why Doesn't Software Show Up in Productivity?

#129

Post by svachalek »

li2uR3ce wrote: post #26

> While software improves through better tooling and faster hardware In my experience faster hardware leads to worse software. I'm doing the same things I've always done on my "smart" phone but apparently the same sized text messages now need more phone. Good god, ICQ from 2000 had more user facing features than texting apps and that was running on Windows-swap-everything-unconditially. Yeah, much software developmen…

I've been in software development 28 years. Seems like we're writing the same stuff we always did, except now it's in a language virtual machine running in a container running in a hardware abstraction VM running on actual hardware in the cloud. Thanks to hardware advances, we can move exponentially sharper images, bigger files, more polygons, but the actual complexity of what software is doing is increasing at a slow linear pace. The biggest gains now are in horizontal scaling, we can now handle way more users in parallel than we ever did 10 years ago. But for most products that don't need to handle a billion users, it's at least as hard to produce a shipping product as it was 20 years ago.

Re: Why Doesn't Software Show Up in Productivity?

#130

Post by beefman »

My family watched Miracle on 34th Street a couple years ago. Aside from being generally impressed with how well it's aged, I was particularly impressed with the office technology on display (pneumatic tubes etc).

In Victorian London, mail could be posted up to 12 times per day.[1] That's about as often as e-mail can be turned around.

Bronze Age merchants exchanged clay tablets with remarkable throughput.[2]

On the consumer side...

I live in Silicon Valley. My grandparents had better access to services than I do — fresh milk delivery, an MD that came to their bedside, and an electric trolley — in the 1930s in a town of 12k ppl. My grandfather was a driver for a laundry service, my grandmother taught piano. [3]

But maybe the most fundamental issue here is that productivity is 'measured' by dividing GDP by hours worked. But work seems better characterized as a mechanism that distributes, rather than creates, GDP.[4]

[1] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/24089/victorian-mail-del...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRcu-ysocX4

[3] https://twitter.com/clumma/status/1297571626901331968

[4] https://twitter.com/clumma/status/835581829654536192

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