101–110 of 751 posts
These things always really need a giant flashing neon note that "productivity" doesn't mean how much workers get done but how much money is made off of what workers get done. They're only loosely connected, and most productivity gains have come from workers having to "do less" to "make more".
This is not how productivity is defined or measured.
I'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 problem…
Does anyone know how productivity for knowledge workers is actually measured? The article only goes so far as to mention that measuring productivity is "particularly tricky", but what datapoints exactly are these statistics even pulling from?
The economic concept of productivity has nothing to do with anything you can measure about a single employee (or kind of employee), the article is just conflating two very different meanings of the same word. In aggregate you measure it based on how much the company spends vs how much it makes off sold product. It's a measure of the efficiency of the company to its holders of capital.
Perhaps 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
It’s the phones. Our attention spans and ability to focus have been destroyed by constant little hits of dopamine.
systemic burnout, overstimulation in all dimensions of life, the rat race is getting harder and harder
I think there's a very obvious reason for the "productivity drop": Return to Office I remember tons of studies showing that remote work had caused unprecedented increases in productivity so it seems plausible to me that companies ending it caused the productivity drop which caused the minor recession earlier this year (the big one due to the Fed's rate hikes is, I believe, still in the future). The article itself eve…
I'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 problem…
I remember pretty early demos in early/mid 2000s when I was doing some clinical grunt work in college. I had written some software to make my department’s life easier so I was offered up as the hospital’s liaison for the software evaluation. This is when I formed my “never replace a terminal based app, with a GUI based app and expect productivity gains” theory. Everyone working in the hospital knew the terminal app, they type in some random 3 letter code and a screen would pop up. Then they would memorize how many tabs each field was apart from each other. Without a mouse, people could just hum along imputing data a blazing speed once some muscle memory was in place. Everyone had little cheat sheets printed out for the less frequently used commands/codes. When you replace this with a browser/desktop GUI with selectors and drop downs and reactive components of GUI, it tends to 1) require mouse usage for most people and 2) lose the ability to do this quick data entry I described. The pretty interface becomes a steady stream of speed bumps that reduce productivity. Since then I’ve witnessed it in banking and other industries too.