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

washingtonpost.com

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

#291

Post by baron816 »

Wouldn’t labor productivity be impacted by really low unemployment and a low real minimum wage?

That should mean lots of people who would not otherwise be part of the labor market are getting low wage/low productivity jobs. So in an aggregate measure dollars of output over hours worked, you’re raising the numerator at slower rate than you’re raising the denominator.

Early in the pandemic, high wage white collar workers stayed home and kept their jobs. Low wage service workers were furloughed. -> labor productivity goes up. Service workers get hired again-> labor productivity drops.

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

#292

Post by VLM »

For many years, for political reasons we'll never have another "great depression", and this has possibly now extended to reporting recessions.

Its worth pointing out that the economic indicator of productivity is basically GDP divided by worker-years-equivalent worked. So if its double-plus ungoodthink to ever report a decline in GDP, we can still, for now, report a decline in productivity while also reporting unemployment remains mostly constant, as long as no one makes the connection and cancels them for reporting disinformation.

Its not a "recession" of course, that would be badthink of the highest order, its just a mysterious decline in the productivity metric, and nobody can talk about why while remaining politically correct. Its a good demonstration of how effective censorship can be. Why, I hear times are so good, the party is increasing the chocolate ration.

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

#293

Post by dleslie »

Mordisquitos wrote: post #144
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…

> 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…

Here in BC, Canada, many places don't even provide you a menu. You're expected to scan a QR code on the table, then use the website it leads you to. So the table fumbles around with their phones, using a website that usually has a terrible UX, and then the server arrives and enters your order on their tablet.

At least they don't require that we install an App. But I'm sure someone's thinking that would be a good idea.

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

#296

Post by badpun »

conductr wrote: post #273
StillBored wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

It's also because it's enterprise software. Which actually isn't software, it's more of a platform. You have to do so much implementation detail that the GUI is just the result of some form-builder type module. Everything I've ever encountered that was enterprise software, felt like it's GUI was not made by humans at all. I don't actually know how they get built but they're almost never optimized for humans or the us…

Nobody wants to pay for better GUIs in enterprise software, so no vendor puts any attention into them. An Enterprise Architect explicitly explained to me (when I was raising a point of choosing a software package that had much better UI) that good UX is a small factor and company (a bank in that case) would rather buy cheaper software and just have its workers suffer more, because it's deemed more cost-effective.

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

#297

Post by Scoundreller »

mattkrause wrote: post #250
Scoundreller wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Laughs from academia....

Trick is to be hourly!

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

#298

Post by blululu »

Wittgenstein's ruler comes to mind: what is 'productivity' measuring?

A quick glance at the chart in the article suggests that the variance of this metric is huge. It is more or less a white noise source with a small DC offset. Given the formula the BLS uses, I would be hard pressed to calculate my own productivity (outside of lawyers and people working on assembly lines or at fast food establishments most people do not keep track of their hours). If I can't measure my own 'productivity' then I have no idea how the hell the BLS is going to do it.

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

#299

Post by mschuster91 »

StillBored wrote: post #242
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…

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,…

> IMHO, this is because the people writting GUI's these days are mostly incompetent, or hamstrung by "web" technologies.

The latter is definitely not the problem. Even the Twitter re-design from a couple years back still supports all the old hotkeys.

All it takes to at least support a tab-based workflow is using the "tabindex" property if your form isn't logically laid out already, and the rest can be done by capturing hotkeys.

Even multimedia content can be operated using hotkeys. Youtube is a good example. There's no excuse but laziness and incompetence IMO.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Global_att...

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

#300

Post by rtp4me »

SauciestGNU wrote: post #61
bdw5204 wrote: post #11

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…

Yeah no kidding. If it were demanded of me to RTO after this time of working remote, they wouldn't get quiet quitting, they'd get active sabotage while I search for a new job. There's no excuse for torturing ICs with RTO for reasons of executive vanity.

Wait, are you saying you would actively sabotage your place of employment because they asked you to work in the office? Did you have the same feeling before WFH was even a thing?

Edit: Also, what does "torturing ICs with RTO for reasons of executive vanity" even mean? Have we come so far that working from an office is now "torture"? If so, the level of privilege is simply astounding...

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