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

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

#581

Post by hammock »

mcguire wrote: post #124
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".

Weird story: From the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, as-measured productivity significantly declined and then stayed at a lower level. This was during the initial few generations of technological impact on industry, including "just-in-time" inventory which kind of requires computerization. Yet, at this same time, "bosses and economists" were seen in public wondering if computers weren't a net negative on industrial prod…

>From the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, as-measured productivity significantly declined and then stayed at a lower level*

*in the USA.

The post-bretton woods era is one of globalization, with American jobs being sent overseas (to more productive labor forces)

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

#582

Post by SanjayMehta »

deadbunny wrote: post #453
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,…

In my experience the rise of GUIs over TUIs they lost the command buffering. If you knew what you were doing with a well designed TUI you could hit a sequence of keys that would be buffered and "replayed" as the next screen(s) loaded. Hit a sequence of commands in a GUI and they'll just get lost after the first one as the app/website loads.

The App Library feature is underrated. A clean screen and search is just so much better than having to scroll through page after page of icons.

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

#583

Post by hotpotamus »

yurishimo wrote: post #393
robertlagrant wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. All the systems are set up this way. The problem is: how do you allow departments to retain their fiefdoms in a world of centralised data? The answer is to spend a fortune on management consulting.

Or nationalize the documentation infrastructure. This is not a problem in the developed world. i give my doctor my tax ID and they can see my entire patient history, all of my medication, and relevant notes from other providers.

I work in EHR as of this year. About a week into the new job, one of the older software engineers made a comment about how what we do should really just be a function of the federal government. I was like, "but wouldn't we be out of a job of they did?" And he said, "sure, but we'll probably be dead by the time they figure it out anyway".

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

#584

Post by rogerkirkness »

As a CEO I have learned this one the hard way: ask the workers like an adult what things are wasting their time. Economists out here like 'how do we solve the vexing problems that ail us' meanwhile the top comment is about how doctors spend 50% of their time doing paperwork. we could double the amount of doctors by hiring secretaries again! Duh.

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

#585

Post by sokoloff »

rogerkirkness wrote: post #584

As a CEO I have learned this one the hard way: ask the workers like an adult what things are wasting their time. Economists out here like 'how do we solve the vexing problems that ail us' meanwhile the top comment is about how doctors spend 50% of their time doing paperwork. we could double the amount of doctors by hiring secretaries again! Duh.

You should ask what’s wasting their time and then do some studying to confirm or correct it. People aren’t very good at objectively reporting how they actually spend/waste their time.

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

#586

Post by adunsulag »

darkmarmot wrote: post #419
RajT88 wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work in Healthcare software (Not Epic). Productivity is indeed a selling point. I will also tell you that EHR software is universally hated by doctors. Does not matter who makes it. The company that cracks that will make billions. One interesting idea was a voice assistant wired up to take inputs as doctors did their work. I don't think it went anywhere (yet).

I work in it too. And the US govt is not approving or even looking to approve new EHRs. The bureaucratic hurdles (and regulatory capture) are such that it is no longer feasible in this country. I would write one in a heartbeat if it wasn't a doomed venture.

There are lots of new EHRs being approved. Just go look on CHPL and you can see that there are a 100 new EHRs that have made it through the 2015 Cures Update certification. Its hard and expensive but it can be done as I can attest to getting our product certified just this year.

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

#587

Post by bkuehl »

jimbokun wrote: post #524
badpun wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My company used UX as a competitive differentiator for Enterprise Software in the healthcare sector. It's so neglected by most software development companies, we were able to get the doctors as our champions to convince the bean counters to consider our products.

We did the same thing in the healthcare sector, but for safety event reporting! It's not like we even did anything groundbreaking with UX. One was just making it so it's easy to fill out a form quickly. You don't even have to touch the mouse if you don't want to. Users love it and it's increased event reporting by a good percentage.

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

#588

Post by jdpigeon »

sippeangelo wrote: post #578
api wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GUIs have really profoundly regressed. Go ready any UI design book from the 80s or 90s. As you say the web is a culprit but so is attempting to shoehorn mobile designs into desktop.

Could you recommend some well acclaimed older UI design books? I’m interested to learn what we’ve lost!

The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin

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

#589

Post by sirjaz »

hnick wrote: post #516
mike_hearn wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well browsers solved multiple other issues too: cross platform apps, updating all clients in a single place, sharing data between devices, and the most important for many developers - switching software from an ownership to a rental model, killing piracy, and easy access to user metrics and data. All of these (except logging on to the same data from all my devices, which is nice) benefit the developer at the expense…

You missed privacy. The user lost privacy with webapps.

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

#590

Post by TeMPOraL »

bobthepanda wrote: post #462
mcguire wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Efficiency argues for keeping those buffers as small as possible. In a series of "normal years", a business that keeps their inventory down to what they need in the "normal case" will be more efficient than one which keeps a larger inventory to handle more rare events. As a result, the former will out-compete the latter in the market. (Inventory, in this example, is just one "buffered" resource that needs to be manag…

Also, to some degree, in events like these what inventory is needed is not predictable, because humans are unpredictable and irrational at times. Panic buying of paper towels early on in the pandemic, as an example, was not predictable.

> Panic buying of paper towels early on in the pandemic, as an example, was not predictable.

What? It was entirely predictable, except maybe for those high-end executives who live in hotels and/or with full-time house service, and are thus completely detached from life of ordinary people.

The panic buying was limited to the most obvious category of goods: basic consumables with some degree of shelf life, prioritized by survival and then comfort. This means food (particularly canned, shelf-stable, or freezable - plus baby food and pet food - and ingredients, including flour, yeast and baking soda), hygiene (soap, toilet paper!, and - perhaps specific to pandemic - hand sanitizers and masks), fuel, household cleaning (including cleaning agents and, surprise surprise, paper towels), comfort consumables (coffee).

It's not hindsight on my part - think of how people individually decided what to buy. They didn't buy whatever they see everyone else buying. They just asked themselves: what do I eat? How do I keep myself and the household clean? What else do I buy on a regular basis? What do I need to maintain a semblance of my current lifestyle? The answers, prioritized, were what everyone then went to stock up on.

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