War, shortages, incompetent / corrupt government, bad behavior being incentivized while good behavior is being punished, and inability to trust people are all really discouraging. What am I working for?
U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
281–290 of 751 posts
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#282Earlier 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. 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.
My wife is in 30s but has had a lot of women's health stuff going on the last decade. We stay completely within the same "healthcare network" of hospitals precisely because they actually use the same system and all doctors can access it (obviously we like the providers as well!) But even for basic procedures we could save a little on like lab work or imaging by going out of this network we've learned it doesn't really work as promised. It's still hard to get your records to stay together unless they're in the same company's database is what we've learned.
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
GDP is denominated in dollars, so this seems to be a somewhat vacuous position - yes, that's how we measure economic activity, but it doesn't have to involve money changing hands. Productivity is based on the value of the work done , not any profitability assessment. The original post which set off this chain asserted it was about not how much workers get done but how much money is made off of what workers get done .…
> The original post which set off this chain asserted it was about not how much workers get done but how much money is made off of what workers get done... which is unambiguously wrong I don't believe the difference is consequential here, since the originating point still holds even using your definition. I wouldn't say it's "wrong" so much as imprecise, as the way I interpreted the statement would encompass your mor…
Yes. My point was that when people read these articles they think of a much more casual definition of productivity that has more to do with a sense of "getting things done," but the word is jargon for something that has little to do with that.
I was playing loose with the jargon meaning for sure, but I'm pulling out to what articles in the Washington Post or other economics-focused media really care about: the impact to corporate bottom line.
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only if they need a lot of capital. Everything else about starting a business is far, far easier than ever. Almost every state in the US has streamlined the business formation process, made it cheaper and faster, etc.
Except for the fact that you won't have healthcare
1. goto healthcare.gov
2. select a plan
3. pay for it
4. congrats, you now have healthcare.
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#285I'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 don’t think productivity was ever the goal of this software.
Well, EHR is a glorified billing platform.
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#286> Since the pandemic started, “the link between hard work and reward has been broken” for many workers, Buber said, resulting in “curbed ambition.”
Over the course of my 10+ year programming career, I've seen this effect steadily increase. Promotions seem to come or not come regardless of how hard you work. Looking back at older books about the tech industry (and comics such as dilbert), it seems like this effect isn't new, but could be something that ebbs and flows over time.
> Productivity tends to move in cycles of 10 to 20 years
See this is what I mean. Perhaps there's a megatrend going on here. Promotions go to those who don't deserve it, so companies self-destruct in their own incompetence, and a new crop of companies rise up, promoting those who are actually productive, and they reign supreme for 10-20 years, before they too become bloated and start promoting under-performers (who look good on paper). And the cycle repeats itself.
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#287I'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,…
I don't consider myself particularly outgoing, but I'm glad to be back in the office 4 days a week. I really enjoy collaborating in person over a laptop or whiteboard, and shooting the breeze with my colleagues. That said, I don't have an overly long commute, so I totally get it for those that are able to be more productive due to not spending hours in the car every day. I notice that when I'm working from home, I'm…
> Plus my wife being there is always distracting me with one thing or another.
More generically: young kids require attention, then we grow up and most adults desire attention but only get a little.
Even very high status individuals often seek attention (Elon & sinks?). I wonder how much of our status economy is about getting attention?
Giving great attention can be quite the aphrodisiac.
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People in tech keep thinking more tech will solve problems and they keep underestimating the flexibility of the old models. Related to this, but in a completely different context, I have had similar thoughts lately when eating out at restaurants in Spain. It's incredibly frustrating from a customer's point of view when the waiter taking your group's order has to use a newfangled tablet or phone-like device and tap…
That's just shitty software though. Good software gets out of the way and improves something. We could speculate on how to fix that scenario, but there's probably no incentive - in my experience there are fixations amongst tech people on profit-less ideas that end up getting squeezed awkwardly into applications such as bill splitting, digital ordering etc.
I completely agree. Software Engineers are no less prone to “when you only know how to use a hammer, everything looks like a nail” as anyone else.
There’s so many things we keep trying to shoehorn tech into that don’t need it— electronic ordering/serving food, planning a small gathering of friends, making a smoothie [1], “smart” fridges/toasters/stoves… these are all adding unnecessary knobs and bobbles to things humanity has gotten by just fine with for ages (the first since the dawn of civilization!)
As a general rule to “will this be tech useful” I think in terms of scale— is this new tech enabling/helping me to do/manage something 10x-100x better than I could with existing tools? Sure, I can organize a single dinner/cocktail party of a couple dozen people via paper invites or text messages and phone calls to caterers, and using tech for that is likely introducing unnecessary overhead, but if I’m a planner organizing many weddings of 100+ for a living then, yeah, obviously a party-planning management software will be of use.
If not, its value is likely not worth the hassle.
[1] https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/01/juicero-s...
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#289facebook
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#290Earlier 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…
We can use an all HTML, Javascript-free interface that people can still memorize and quickly Tab through.
But that's not what anyone was selling at the time. I'm sure complexity has only increased since then.
It was pre-AJAX and pre-"Javascript being useful", I think even pre-Firefox and was IE6 only. So it was loading java applets and stuff to just get some basic functionality