271–280 of 751 posts
That and being forced back into offices after working remotely for 2 years.
The very important context is that productivity sharply rose in 2020, in the middle of the Covid recession. The recent drop in productivity is mostly just a return to pre-pandemic baseline. The simplest explanation is probably just that the workers who were laid off during Covid were the least productive, and so average worker output went up, then fell as they re-entered the labor force. Or maybe even just there was…
Their chart shows we are far below any sort of pre-pandemic baseline.
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…
IMHO, this is because the people writting GUI's these days are mostly incompetent, or hamstrung by "web" technologies. Early GUI's didn't have the problem you describe because they were designed as discovery mechanisms to the underlying function. AKA, the idea was that after clicking File->Save a dozen times you would remember the keyboard accelerators displayed on the right hand side of the menu. Or if nothing else,…
Perhaps it has to do with the fact that businesses run on skeleton crews these days, and stretching a low number of employees thin decreases their productivity. I'm sure that employees say the same thing if they were directly asked. That and being forced back into offices after working remotely for 2 years.
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…
I can imagine this being true. It seems that almost the whole software industry has failed to grasp the distinction between an appliance and a tool. An appliance you expect almost anyone to be able to use without training. A tool, well you are expected to learn how to use it, and after that, you are much more productive than before. And most software seems to be moving towards appliance.
I'm a midwesterner and half of my siblings, most of my wife's siblings, and some of my friends' siblings are in their late 20s, have no jobs (or From the outside, they look nervous / afraid to try to get into the job market or to date people. Men & women, but it leans men. The ones in poorer families stay home all day and play video games, and the richer ones venture out to spend their parent's money at restaurants or on trips but otherwise do the same. Half of them were doing minimum-wage work and left at the start of the pandemic and the other half have never had jobs.
I could just be in a local pocket of people like this, but I'm worried about how many people must have fallen off of the wagon and will never get back on.
Trying to get a skilled entry-level job after having done literally nothing for 5 years is hard for a lot of reasons. One being the mental hurdle you have to get over: you know you'll face a lot of rejection, you're out of practice, and your work peers will be a lot younger.
--------------
Controversial opinion: The whole thing has burnt me on UBI. I am afraid that the average American doesn't have the discipline to be productive if we introduce too much free income / free state of subsistence.
A great counter-argument is "well why does someone have to be productive? why should anyone have to work?". I don't know anything, but I suspect that we get to ask that question because of how dominant/rich the US is, and that is bound to end if we aren't more than competitive against countries that work their asses off.
Another counter is something like: exceptional people are responsible for the 10x-1000x outcomes that carry the economy, but those individuals are only the catalyst and do it on the backs of the rest of us. Takes all parts to make the machine work.
--------------
Back on topic. Here's some graphs:
FRED Graphs:
Hours worked by full-time and part-time employees by year: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/B4701C0A222NBEA
US Pop: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/POPTOTUSA647NWDB
Median weekly real earnings: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
Employment-Population Ratio - 25-54 Yrs.: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060
Real gross domestic product per capita https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA --------
US Employment rate by age 2000-2021: https://www.statista.com/statistics/217899/us-employment-rat...
I'm pretty sure I know why... The working environment changed. Bit by bit I moved from an environment with gentleman's agreements and so on towards something in which everything was codified, safetyism became rampant, etc. In the UK over the past few years I went from going into a nice office in a number of beautiful old buildings, getting my stuff done with cameraderie, having lunch together and playing board games,…
> towards something in which everything was codified, safetyism became rampant Those "gentleman's agreements" were not that great if you happened to be a woman, gay or any other minority. The upsides to HR, employment regulation and so on has been making the office a far better place to work for a lot of people. While I agree that there are rampant problems in a lot of sectors, from low skilled to medical, there have…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They have access to the same health insurance, it is just expensive, which goes back to needing capital. It is trivial to go to healthcare.gov and buy the same health insurance an employer subsidizes for employees.
> It is trivial to go to healthcare.gov and buy the same health insurance an employer subsidizes for employees. This is so shockingly false in most states that I don't understand how you feel you have enough personal experience to state this so confidently. Neither California nor Texas have any PPO-style plans available on healthcare.gov. For all the public / self-employed plans, "Out-of-network" means "Pay for it yo…
Everyone can find out the cost of their health insurance including employer subsidized in box 12 code DD of W-2. Mine have been very close to the healthcare.gov prices, which NJ conveniently lists here: https://www.state.nj.us/dobi/division_insurance/ihcseh/ihcra...
Also, the individual maximum out of pocket maximum is much less than $22k:
https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/out-of-pocket-maximum-li...
>Anyone who is pro-business, pro-entrepreneur, should generally be for good public healthcare. This would relieve businesses of a LOT of administrative burden and overhead to let them focus on their core value proposition.
The current situation where businesses get to silo wealthy, young, white collar workers into healthier pools of insureds, and the ability to purchase insurance with pre tax money rather than post tax for individuals whose employer does not subsidize is all beneficial to large employers. Which is how they like it.
If the US is going to stick with insurance system, then at least everyone should be dumped on healthcare.gov and employers completely removed from the equation.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You can have both. GUIs were a breakthrough because they enabled much better discoverability, allowed images in the UI and so on. But they were also designed to be fully keyboardable and low latency. Web tech broke all that: - UI was/still is very high latency. Keystrokes input whilst the browser is waiting do not buffer, unlike in classical mainframe/terminal designs. They're just lost or worse might randomly interr…
HTML has had a limited concept of accelerator keys for years, but it's not pretty:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Global_att...