U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why • Hacker News Board

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#191

Post by tremon » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 7:42 PM UTC

Underqualified wrote: post #169

conductr wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think productivity was ever the goal of this software. It was to have a record that is standard, digital, transferable, etc. Doctors fought it as long as they could because they knew what it meant for them. 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…

The GUI apps have the benefit of being easier for onboarding. We've redesigned the workplace to deal with constant employee turnover. I guess they also make more sense to management since it looks like something they could do themselves, or at least understand.

This is a good observation. Constant employee turnover also reduces worker productivity, as it means most current employees are juniors in their role (regardless of what their title says).

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#192

Post by mbesto » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 7:42 PM UTC

conductr wrote: post #110

lkrubner wrote: post #88

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 don’t think productivity was ever the goal of this software. It was to have a record that is standard, digital, transferable, etc. Doctors fought it as long as they could because they knew what it meant for them. 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…

> It was to have a record that is standard, digital, transferable, etc.

Which translates into productivity. If something is standard, digital and transferable it means you can increase the rate of output in relation to its input (which is the definition of productivity).

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#193

Post by sokoloff » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 7:43 PM UTC

ip26 wrote: post #167

conductr wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think productivity was ever the goal of this software. It was to have a record that is standard, digital, transferable, etc. Doctors fought it as long as they could because they knew what it meant for them. 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…

I don’t think productivity was ever the goal of this software. It was to have a record that is standard, digital, transferable, etc. Going a little further, this was appealing in part to avoid simple medical errors & oversights. Losing the record, mixing up records, incomplete history, and so on. Eliminating medical error is incredibly valuable but doesn't show up as "productivity".

This is amusing as, 10 years ago, my wife (a decade-plus under 60, even now) showed up to a consultation with a doctor who remarked that she looked very good for someone over 60 and who suffered from a series of conditions that she did not have but showed up in "her" medical records.

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#194

Post by boole1854 » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 7:43 PM UTC

kennend3 wrote: post #4

Perhaps people are at the point of revolt over the ever widening productivity vs pay gap? https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ Productivity kept on climbing and wages stagnated post ~1980 Time for the workers to reap some of that benefit.

> https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

The history of that EPI report is useful to know. Early versions of it showed a large gap between rising productivity and stagnating employee compensation.

Some critics then pointed out problems with the analysis [1]. The report performed an apples-to-oranges comparison of productivity of (A) all non-farm workers adjusted over time with a (B) GDP deflator-based inflation index compared with the compensation of (A) a limited subset of employees adjusted over time with a (B) CPI-based inflation index. A more useful comparison would use the same inflation index for both data sets and would exclude from the productivity measure the workers that are also excluded from the compensation measure. When this is done, the growth in productivity and pay rise and nearly in lockstep, thus effectively refuting the majority of the point that the original report was trying to make.

Since then, the EPI report has been updated to be more nuanced, which can be especially seen when one expands the 'click here for more...' sections. The new conclusion from the report is that productivity and compensation increases have been increasing primarily for a subset of workers while a broad subset of workers have not seen large productivity and compensation growth. This is true (as far as I can tell), but it's also a different story with different policy implications than the original story which implied diverging productivity and pay within the same set of workers.

[1] https://www.heritage.org/jobs-and-labor/report/workers-compe...

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#195

Post by Scoundreller » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 7:44 PM UTC

Underqualified wrote: post #169

conductr wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think productivity was ever the goal of this software. It was to have a record that is standard, digital, transferable, etc. Doctors fought it as long as they could because they knew what it meant for them. 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…

The GUI apps have the benefit of being easier for onboarding. We've redesigned the workplace to deal with constant employee turnover. I guess they also make more sense to management since it looks like something they could do themselves, or at least understand.

Problem is the GUI could have shortcuts for everything, but usually won’t.

It doesn’t help that the evaluators for a new system will also approach from the perspective of a new user, even though none of them will be a new user in some months.

I’ve so wanted to create auto-hot-keys for many tasks, but end up having to use (x,y) clicks where I get boned every design touch-up (deliberate or side-effect of another change).

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#196

Post by bluedino » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 7:44 PM UTC

rr808 wrote: post #72

Lots of people are productive WFH, but loads are taking it easy. Often in my team Fridays people barely dial in, maybe are connected a few hours max. Thursday afternoons now are dead as people get ready for the weekend... Job market is still strong so no one really cares that much as we know we're difficult to replace.

I switched jobs at the beginning of the year, and still haven't figured out if people here just don't work on Fridays or did that start with WFH?

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#197

Post by onlyrealcuzzo » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 7:44 PM UTC

Scoundreller wrote: post #188

yamtaddle wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also fought it because they didn't go to medical school and survive residency to fill out forms all damn day—and they didn't used to have to, they had staff for that. Then the computerized systems "replaced" that staff but all that really means is they cut the human time needed low enough that full-time workers weren't needed, but didn't eliminate it, so now that's another thing doctors have to do themselves. AF…

Seems an artefact of doctors not being employees. If their employment status was the same as everyone else’s, there wouldn’t be any effort to replace admin staff with someone getting paid 10x as much unless there was actually a 90% reduction in work (doubtful).

You can reduce 90% of the work - but if the remaining 10% is shifted to someone that gets paid 50x as much, it's still a loss.

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#198

Post by mcguire » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 7:44 PM UTC

NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #152

mcguire wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, how much money changes hands off of how much workers work?

If this is a good faith question, you can answer it by reference to any good economics text; or even, you know, Wikipedia. But it feels like maybe it's not. Here's another example: you volunteer at a homeless shelter, where you serve food on a soup kitchen line. You have contributed to the GDP of the United States. By all means, feel free to fit this into your preferred framework.

What I'm doing is putting how you describe productivity into the form from the original comment. And I'll stand by that last version: How much money changes hands off of how much workers work?

The input to labor productivity is how many hours are worked, correct? And no one is measuring output in terms of the number of bowls of soup produced by homeless shelters; those are converted to dollars based on a current index price.

So you have economic activity, how much money changes hands, compared to labor inputs, how much workers work. Simple?

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#199

Post by karaterobot » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 7:44 PM UTC

> 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, leading some economists to suggest that the pandemic might spark longer-term growth.

We're talking about a 4% change? That's the "plunge"? When it spiked during the pandemic, they were ready to conclude that it would always be like that, forever and ever, if not continuing to grow higher and higher? Both these positions are ridiculous, given how small the differences in both cases are, and how squishy a measurement productivity is in the first place. "If these trends continue, nobody will be doing any work in twenty years, and we won't even be able to tell you about it because we won't be working either!!!"

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#200

Post by Tsarbomb » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 7:44 PM UTC

lkrubner wrote: post #88

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…

Having once worked in the EMR/EHR space, a big thing to consider is some companies come in with their own workflows, processes, and ideas that they want to push onto physicians while other companies are way more accommodating in building "bespoke" solutions to specific problems.

The latter in my experience ends up providing better results to physicians as they have been employed as domain experts in building the software solution to their specific workflow. I've seen it done for in ophthalmology, specific disease/injury specific radiology, and diabetic specific checkup and appointments where I've seen as much as a 75% reduction in the amount of time the physician has to dedicate lookup up info, cross-referencing, and documenting.