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

#321

Post by blululu » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 8:57 PM UTC

stormbrew wrote: post #74

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".

It's even stupider than that: it divides this figure by a largely fabricated estimate of how many hours people actually worked. This is a SWAG metric that is largely made up. The commentary is most likely irrelevant.

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

#322

Post by dan_quixote » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 8:57 PM UTC

Scoundreller wrote: post #115

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'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. It’s less the software, and more the users, site-specif…

> Another study found US clinicians write 4x longer notes

I wasn't aware of this, but as the spouse of a medical provider I know that most US providers are burdened with an ever-present worry about malpractice.

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

#323

Post by coinbasetwwa » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 8:58 PM UTC

throwaway5959 wrote: post #218

We’re fucking exhausted and there’s never an end to work (agile). That’s probably part of it.

Yes!!! Waterfall could solve this in many ways.

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

#324

Post by superkuh » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 8:58 PM UTC

cm42 wrote: post #266

superkuh wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"hits of dopamine" is not really how it works. Drugs like methamphetamine or cocaine directly give you "hits" of dopamine. Perceiving a stimuli through your senses does not directly manipulate the dopaminergic neuronal populations. It's just like any other stimuli where, if the stimulus is actually intrinsically rewarding, eventually the dopaminergic populations in your brain begin to associate the stimuli with poten…

I agree with your ultimate conclusion ("Using a computer is not a drug"), and that this is an important consideration, but to play with the forest-trees thing here, the stimulus I think most people perceive and/or conditioned to is the alert tone and/or vibration, which I believe has been argued to (not in their words) have some inherent salience, once the user is conditioned by carrying a phone around for a while, a…

If you want to argue this then at least use the correct description of the proximal cause, "hits of glutamate in the shell of the nucleus accumbens and ventral tegmental area". It doesn't roll off the tongue and focusing on the neurochemistry ignores the context. So maybe it's better to just say it simply, "If you enjoy doing an enjoyable thing and you do it a lot you'll anticipate liking it more than reality provides on average."

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

#325

Post by svnt » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 8:58 PM UTC

lkrubner wrote: post #98

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…

The BLS recently reported that at its peak, only 7% of Americans were working from home, so this demographic is probably too small to have much large scale impact on the productivity numbers. If there is stagnation in the productivity numbers, we should look at what the other 93% of workers are doing.

How did they conduct the measure? 7% is nowhere near what the real estate picture says.

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

#326

Post by noptd » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 8:58 PM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #119

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.

Excellent, this provides productive evidence for a 4 day work week if everything still runs with folks checked out on Fridays and they’re not in the office performing work theater. https://www.4dayweek.com/ Labor power in the face of a recession comes from dwindling labor supply. 360k boomers retire each month in the US. 1.8 million people over the age of 55 die every year. Not enough folks to backfill. https://archi…

>this provides productive evidence for a 4 day work week if everything still runs with folks checked out on Fridays and they’re not in the office performing work theater.

Not exactly. Unless 100% of workers are only working 4 day work weeks, it's impossible to account for the confounding variable of other workers picking up the slack when analyzing these trends from a macro view.

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

#327

Post by nottorp » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 8:58 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…

Last time I had a blood test it took 2 minutes to take my blood and 15 to enter crap in various forms on the computer. And I'm not even in the US. There was a lot of clicking involved.

To contrast, my first job was an accounting program. We spent weeks on making sure everything works via just the keyboard and some operations are as streamlined as possible. Because in some cases it was going to be used by people creating hundreds of invoices per day.

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

#328

Post by VLM » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 8:58 PM UTC

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…

Classic business process mistake of trying to change a verbal contract into a form-letter.

"I'd like a quarter pounder with cheese and fries" is utterly unacceptable for buying a house or taking out a car loan, but it's the ideal way to order lunch. The people marketing, designing, and writing the application software have never worked in the business, of course, lack of experience has never made people like that pause, so they have peculiar ideas resulting in enforcement of weird and unproductive business processes.

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

#329

Post by gridspy » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 8:59 PM UTC

QuercusMax wrote: post #253

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…

"Fun" fact: the Therac-25 tragedy was in part caused by this type of usage - folks who know it so well they just blast through the screens from memory. But the software in question wasn't resilient to this use-case, and apparently resulted in an inconsistent state.

Good example.

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The system distinguished between errors that halted the machine, requiring a restart, and errors which merely paused the machine (which allowed operators to continue with the same settings using a keypress). However, some errors which endangered the patient merely paused the machine, and the frequent occurrence of minor errors caused operators to become accustomed to habitually unpausing the machine.

One failure occurred when a particular sequence of keystrokes was entered on the VT-100 terminal which controlled the PDP-11 computer: if the operator were to press "X" to (erroneously) select 25 MeV photon mode, then use "cursor up" to edit the input to "E" to (correctly) select 25 MeV Electron mode, then "Enter", all within eight seconds of the first keypress, well within the capability of an experienced user of the machine. These edits weren't noticed as it would take 8 seconds for startup, so it would go with the default setup.[3]

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... which allowed the electron beam to be set for X-ray mode without the X-ray target being in place. A second fault allowed the electron beam to activate during field-light mode, during which no beam scanner was active or target was in place.

Previous models had hardware interlocks to prevent such faults, but the Therac-25 had removed them, depending instead on software checks for safety.

The high-current electron beam struck the patients with approximately 100 times the intended dose of radiation, and over a narrower area, delivering a potentially lethal dose of beta radiation. The feeling was described by patient Ray Cox as "an intense electric shock", causing him to scream and run out of the treatment room.[4] Several days later, radiation burns appeared, and the patients showed the symptoms of radiation poisoning; in three cases, the injured patients later died as a result of the overdose.[5]

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In response to incidents like those associated with Therac-25, the IEC 62304 standard was created, which introduces development life cycle standards for medical device software and specific guidance on using software of unknown pedigree.[7]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

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

#330

Post by justinpombrio » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 9:00 PM UTC

throwaway894345 wrote: post #269

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'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. I don't think "by almost any measure" is right. I think…

> notably healthcare researchers use this data to improve patient care, develop new medicines, and to precisely identify which medicines are likely to help on a particular patient (and which medicines may even harm them!)

The majority of the notes being written by doctors now is boilerplate. A lot of it is copy-pasted. It's written because of insurance companies (which have incentive to deny claims), because of liability (which gives incentive to leave a lot of notes behind to make it looks like you thought about everything under the sun even if it wasn't applicable), and because of well-meaning but ultimately overly broad laws adding additional requirements even when they don't quite make sense.

I'm sure there is a treasure-trove of valuable data in there, especially compared to when it was all hidden away on physical paper. But you could probably reduce the paperwork that doctors do these days by a factor of 4 and not loose anything of value.