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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

#261

Post by taeric »

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…

I agree it is almost certainly related. In that a lot of the reporting on rise of productivity that came at the beginning was just as explainable by noise as the current drop is.

That is, I can't rule this out. But I would also not bet against reversion to the mean. Such that the actual waterline on productivity is probably not known, just yet.

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

#262

Post by OkayPhysicist »

mbesto wrote: post #214
marginalia_nu wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but it's the records that are standard, digital and transferrable; not the work. So what you end up optimizing for is producing paperwork.

huh? if the records are "standard, digital and transferrable", it means all of the work associated with those records is sped up. - Need to retrieve past doctor visits about a patient? person at front desk no longer needs to walk to the folder closet, then scan the whole thing to find your name and then read through all of the documents to find the relevant visits. just click a button. - How about getting the prescri…

The problem is that you've optimized time savings for the cheapest people for a hospital to employ at the cost of time spent by the most expensive people a hospital employs, eliminating a handful of cheap jobs while making the expensive jobs both less efficient and happy.

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

#263

Post by quickthrower2 »

nradov wrote: post #176
D13Fd wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right about daycare/school closings. Even now, essentially post-covid, if our two-year-old gets COVID, that's a 10-day quarantine from daycare. That's 10 days where one of the parents has to work from home and be horribly unproductive because they are watching a child at the same time. And you can get COVID repeatedly. It often from the daycare itself, but also from a sibling who is in school. Even with full,…

This is exactly why many people intentionally avoid testing themselves or their children. If you don't have a positive test then officially you don't have COVID-19 and can continue your normal life (symptoms permitting). (I'm not claiming that this is a good practice necessarily but it's what most parents do.)

They could do home tests though. But PCR would be “on the record”

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

#264

Post by AussieWog93 »

conductr wrote: post #110
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 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…

>This is when I formed my “never replace a terminal based app, with a GUI based app and expect productivity gains” theory.

Not in medicine (run a small e-commerce business selling mostly used video games), but definitely noticed the same thing for us.

We have some terminal-based Python scripts I wrote to automate a lot of the data entry tasks like listing and shipping (entering tracking numbers, printing labels).

Everyone that uses the scripts is initially apprehensive, but then after maybe a day of getting used to the terminal turns into a powerful data entry God and they love it. Even had an employee gush about our shipping tool to a random supplier.

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

#265

Post by mike_hearn »

Underqualified wrote: post #169
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…

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 interrupt your current transaction.

- HTML has no concept of keyboard shortcuts, accelerator keys, menus, context menus, command lines and other power user features that allow regular users to go fast.

We adopted web tech even for productivity/crud apps, because browsers solved distribution at a time when Microsoft was badly dropping the ball on it. That solved problems for developers and allowed more rapid iteration, but ended up yielding lower productivity than older generations of apps for people who became highly skilled.

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

#266

Post by cm42 »

superkuh wrote: post #77
FearlessNebula wrote: post #14

It’s the phones. Our attention spans and ability to focus have been destroyed by constant little hits of dopamine.

"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, at least.

I believe this is one of the avenues argued for "Tech Addictive"/"Screens Bad" - that the intrinsic value of bzzzzzt could, at least hypothetically, be as high as, say, nudes or an "omw" text, or even your dealer texting he's 5min away; and that this inflated value is in turn projected, however briefly, onto every once-in-a-lifetime sale and useless 3am app notification about an icon set update or something.

There's also obviously the much-written-about addictive UI/UX features employed in various places. I vaguely recall one or two unfortunate email chains, maybe, but am assuming most product teams didn't go into meetings with nefarious intentions of getting their users psychologically addicted.

Nevertheless, addictions can be triggered by adjacent things, and however little dopamine "all the little red little circles all over the place" release in my grandmother's brain is probably very different from a chainsmoking coke user taking a swig from his bottle as he picks up his phone to see: - 32 New Facebook notifications! - Your dispensary order is ready for pickup! - sexybabe_notabot69 liked your profile! - Your bank account is overdrawn! - 18 new Twitter notifications! - ALL NEW SLOT MACHINES! NOW WITH DIFFERENT KINDS OF FRUIT AND SHAPES! - You're never gonna learn Spanish if you keep doing drugs, Carl! - DON'T MISS OUT! JIMMY BUFFET LIVE AT THE CASINO THIS WEEKEND! - Your order has shipped! - YOU'RE GONNA LOSE YOUR VIP STATUS IF YOU DON'T COME BACK HERE AND GAMBLE - Re: Hey - THIS WEEKEND ONLY!!!! ANNUAL ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME SALE!

I think I could probably make the argument that maximizing for, say, MAUs/DAUs, is essentially an addictive cycle - a la "valueless reward" - in the business process, probably citing lots of business types who have written lots about how optimizing for the wrong metrics will leave your company broke and homeless too.

So, I guess I'm saying "Using a computer is not a drug", particularly as you used it, is nearly indisputably true, but somewhat misses the conversation being had (however dumb), and that it's worth looking at all of the links in the causal chain and examining how, for example, alarm fatigue and compare and contrast (and occur comorbidly with) actual addictive and/or depressive syndromes - for exactly the reasons you listed, like:

"We've found that homeless people using Facebook are xy.z% more likely to relapse on heroin, don't understand statistics, and therefore don't allow our clients to use the internet, except for this one from 2005 that lets them digitally sign the form we need to get reimbursed for the bed."

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

#267

Post by quickthrower2 »

highwaylights wrote: post #86
sylens wrote: post #6

Perhaps people have had to expend more energy just keeping their personal life together in the last few years. People with children have had to deal with the constant school closings, childcare facility closings, etc. and that has taken its toll. They may have family members who got Covid or had treatment for other ailments delayed by the pandemic's rush to treat Covid patients. They could've experienced a huge shift…

“Expected to make another huge shift back to in office working” Well, you kids have fun. sound of me closing the door in my pyjamas with a nice hot coffee in my other hand

Yes. I will WFH just for the perk of having good coffee!

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

#268

Post by subsubzero »

I have a hunch, The past 10-15 years has seen a large slew of mergers in all industries, (tech, telecoms, pharma, food, grocery, etc) that have created shared monopolies in most sectors of the economy. Given that news, monopolies function is not to deliver productivity for productivity's sake, but to extract profits from inside that sector. Most of these companies are sprawling behemoths where managers are encouraged to grow headcount(as it makes them look more important) while still keeping the profit machines flowing. I'm not the least bit surprised as if we had a country where smaller players were duking it out in their respective sectors, you would get faster innovation.

Bottom line, more competition is good for end customers, and good for productivity as well.

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

#269

Post by throwaway894345 »

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 in a very narrow sense they've become less productive (they see fewer patients), but by your own admission they're building databases of patient data, which you seem to suppose are only useful to the likes of Epic, but obviously Epic has customers--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!). This is stuff clearly benefits society, and doctors' role in this should be counted as "productive", although we can quibble about the relative value of facilitating healthcare research versus seeing more patients.

Note that this isn't meant to vouch for Epic--I work for a company that consumes their data and anyone who has to integrate with them has nothing good to say about the software, but the role it plays is still incredibly important.

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

#270

Post by baxtr »

cestith wrote: post #26
ep103 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

During Covid, people were hiding in their homes, quarantined, with nothing to do but work. This year, companies expect workers to return to office, despite little change in conditions, except now we have to deal with all of the above issues you've just mentioned, AND the fact that employees have now proven they can work remotely perfectly well. It should neither be surprising that in a system where healthcare is tied…

All of what you've both said, plus the number of people who thought or still think COVID-19 is "no big deal" who now have a pulmonary deficiency and long-term mental fog.

The difficult part of it is: for some people it is literally nothing. We had it now for the fourth time since 2020 even though we’re properly vaccinated and careful as much as life permits.

It’s a bit worse than a cold but much better for than the flu. So, yes, for us life just goes on with COVID. No need to change anything.

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