Just came into the thread for the comments and am not disappointed.
U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
81–90 of 751 posts
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#82The lowering of standards, shortages, expensive fuel, food inflation are all reminiscent of Communism. People don't feel like working for a system when it seems to be failing them. A million dollars for a new home, when the lower bracket still makes under 50k, and get raises in cents. Just kind of kills incentive to work hard, when even if you do starve and penny pinch your way into some savings, inflation will eat it away anyway.
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#83> In the first half of 2022, productivity — the measure of how much output in goods and services an employee can produce in an hour — plunged by the sharpest rate on record going back to 1947, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. > The productivity plunge is perplexing, because productivity took off to levels not seen in decades when the coronavirus pandemic forced an overnight switch to remote work…
If this is true, why was productivity so high pre-pandemic when everyone was in an office?
What everyone is ignoring is that financial speculation leaks into productivity numbers, and we went into a speculative boom during covid and have been in a speculative bust during this recent period.
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#84There is rising incompetence everywhere.
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#85The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy. It's that I just don't care.
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#86Perhaps people have had to expend more energy just keeping their personal life together in the last few years. People with children have had to deal with the constant school closings, childcare facility closings, etc. and that has taken its toll. They may have family members who got Covid or had treatment for other ailments delayed by the pandemic's rush to treat Covid patients. They could've experienced a huge shift…
“Expected to make another huge shift back to in office working”
Well, you kids have fun.
sound of me closing the door in my pyjamas with a nice hot coffee in my other hand
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#87Quippy Answer: Bloat-tastic manager/worker ratios, plus meetings and other busywork.
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#88I've read that doctors now spend as much as 50% of their time documenting their work. Companies such as Epic, which provide the software that hospitals use to build databases of patient data, have been big winners in the new world of hospitals-depending-on-software. But did the doctors become more productive? By almost any measure, they became less productive.
People in tech keep thinking more tech will solve problems and they keep underestimating the flexibility of the old models. For instance, most large companies used to be run by armies of secretaries, and the senior secretaries functioned as what we would now call "project managers" -- they made calendars, oversaw who was working on what, followed up to keep track on whether work was being done, and kept a close eye on what money was being spent. The crucial thing about having humans overseeing such work is that humans can take a flexible approach to the rules: they know when to break them. By contrast, systems that are highly dependent on software tend to be more rigid. Software doesn't know when its rules should be broken.
The flexibility of the old system is constantly underestimated, the rigidness of the new systems is often misunderstood.
In his book "The Design Of Design" Fred Brooks talks about the power of trust, and he contrasts that situations where everything needs to be first negotiated and specified in a contract. High trust systems are flexible and fast, whereas a system where every detail needs to be specified in a contract is slow and rigid. We should stop and ask ourselves, our favorite Agile methodology resembles which of these? Are specifying things with needless detail?
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#89> In the first half of 2022, productivity — the measure of how much output in goods and services an employee can produce in an hour — plunged by the sharpest rate on record going back to 1947, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. > The productivity plunge is perplexing, because productivity took off to levels not seen in decades when the coronavirus pandemic forced an overnight switch to remote work…
If this is true, why was productivity so high pre-pandemic when everyone was in an office?
This article and the chart within it reference the rate of change in productivity, but not the raw productivity number.
Without seeing those numbers, my assumption -- and what seems to be implied here -- is that productivity rose in early 2020 with remote work, and it is now dropping to pre-pandemic levels.
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#90systemic burnout, overstimulation in all dimensions of life, the rat race is getting harder and harder