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The Great Productivity Puzzle

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Re: The Great Productivity Puzzle

#41

Post by Jtsummers »

ldehaan wrote: post #39
Retra wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People really don't communicate as well when they aren't collocated.

that's an uninteresting opinion. I've been communicating solely with people for years, from home, using chat and sometimes video, but usually just text. I don't forget what someone just told me. I have a trail of requests and ideas from clients and coworkers. if necessary I will jump on a phone call for faster data transfer. the office is great for talking to coworkers, which is almost always about non work stuff, vs…

Similarly, in my office too many people try to communicate tasks and plans to me verbally. I've had to tell them to send me emails (or put in a JIRA entry or whatever).

I cannot incorporate something into my task list that's undocumented, and text (email or JIRA preferred, chat is sufficient for small things but can't be a priority item) is a fantastic way to ensure that it makes it into the queue.

Re: The Great Productivity Puzzle

#42

Post by Animats »

dredmorbius wrote: post #38
Animats wrote: post #14

Something that's puzzled me for a while: why haven't we hit "peak office" yet? Why are there still so many people working in offices? By now, we should have many abandoned office blocks, much as we have abandoned factories in the Rust Belt. But that's not happening. We have all this office automation, but too many people in offices. Are marketing cost and G&A (general and administrative) increasing as a fraction of c…

Is that a "why is there so much office work" question, or "why are there so many people travelling to offices"? On the former: perhaps the Jevons Paradox at work, or something alligned with it, Baumol's Cost Disease and Amdahl's Law both come to mind. The Jevons Paradox notes that as a thing becomes cheaper , the total amount of it demanded can increase . A particularly noteable case of this is the cotton gin ("cotto…

Re "Jevons Paradox". That doesn't mean employment goes up. There's a little book, "Chapters on Machinery and Labor", from a century ago which outlines three ways this worked out.

The "good case" was mechanized typesetting, the Linotype. This produced a huge increase in print shop productivity and a huge increase in the amount of printed material. The result was an increase in printing employment (That lasted until the 1980s; printing today is almost dead as a trade, and print shops have few people in them.)

The "medium case" was glassblowing. The introduction of automatic bottle-making machines did automatically what used to take a skilled team of five men working closely together. Bottle consumption went up sharply, and but employment in bottlemaking did not. The skill level went down, since feeding a bottle-making machine isn't that hard, so wages dropped.

The "bad case" was the stone planer. This was a machine to make stone lintels for the tops of doors and windows in brick construction. The stone planer made it much cheaper to do this. But lintel consumption didn't go up, because lintels are a small fraction of building cost. Lots of men with hammers and chisels become unemployed.

Re: The Great Productivity Puzzle

#43

Post by Retra »

ldehaan wrote: post #39
Retra wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People really don't communicate as well when they aren't collocated.

that's an uninteresting opinion. I've been communicating solely with people for years, from home, using chat and sometimes video, but usually just text. I don't forget what someone just told me. I have a trail of requests and ideas from clients and coworkers. if necessary I will jump on a phone call for faster data transfer. the office is great for talking to coworkers, which is almost always about non work stuff, vs…

You could go on, but you're never going to explain how your communication has actually worsened because you are unaware of it.

Hell, I could give you a good dozen examples of interesting things that can't be communicated properly over long distance, but I'm never going to prove that here, am I? You're never going to understand how confident or uncertain I am. You're never going to grasp an idea that isn't already weighed down by the bias of my word choices and take it with it's natural abstract flexibility and apply it on your own terms.

So I won't take you at your word.

Re: The Great Productivity Puzzle

#44

Post by chrismcb »

Animats wrote: post #14

Something that's puzzled me for a while: why haven't we hit "peak office" yet? Why are there still so many people working in offices? By now, we should have many abandoned office blocks, much as we have abandoned factories in the Rust Belt. But that's not happening. We have all this office automation, but too many people in offices. Are marketing cost and G&A (general and administrative) increasing as a fraction of c…

Meetings. People love meetings. It is much easier to have face to face meetings if you are in the same area. Of course the meetings are mostly pointless, but people still love to have them. Even in an environment where you can do 90 - 100 percent is your work remotely they still insist on you coming into an office. Even though slack or Skype can handle most meetings.

Re: The Great Productivity Puzzle

#45

Post by ldehaan »

Retra wrote: post #43
ldehaan wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's an uninteresting opinion. I've been communicating solely with people for years, from home, using chat and sometimes video, but usually just text. I don't forget what someone just told me. I have a trail of requests and ideas from clients and coworkers. if necessary I will jump on a phone call for faster data transfer. the office is great for talking to coworkers, which is almost always about non work stuff, vs…

You could go on, but you're never going to explain how your communication has actually worsened because you are unaware of it. Hell, I could give you a good dozen examples of interesting things that can't be communicated properly over long distance, but I'm never going to prove that here, am I? You're never going to understand how confident or uncertain I am. You're never going to grasp an idea that isn't already wei…

well that's true, I'm a little fishbowled because I work in devops, so my conversations are constrained to technical matters which don't require (if your team is any good) trust in anything but the code you review and accept.

I restrict conversations about jobs, raises and things that require convincing to face to face encounters, but those are intermittent and not a daily or even weekly occurrence.

since the majority of my conversations are: hey, X needs to be done on Y, or build a mesos cluster on Z, or we're having intermittent connection issues on demo. It makes sense to have everything written down for reference, jira helps too, but getting the business side to create tickets is harder than it looks.

overall maybe it's more of a role based issue.

Re: The Great Productivity Puzzle

#46

Post by TeMPOraL »

Jtsummers wrote: post #41
ldehaan wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's an uninteresting opinion. I've been communicating solely with people for years, from home, using chat and sometimes video, but usually just text. I don't forget what someone just told me. I have a trail of requests and ideas from clients and coworkers. if necessary I will jump on a phone call for faster data transfer. the office is great for talking to coworkers, which is almost always about non work stuff, vs…

Similarly, in my office too many people try to communicate tasks and plans to me verbally. I've had to tell them to send me emails (or put in a JIRA entry or whatever). I cannot incorporate something into my task list that's undocumented, and text (email or JIRA preferred, chat is sufficient for small things but can't be a priority item) is a fantastic way to ensure that it makes it into the queue.

Indeed. Hell, I apply it to life in general (and I wish people would do less talking and more e-mailing). I often get friends and family make random requests in the middle of me doing something, and at some point I started telling everyone - if you want something important, write me a goddamn e-mail. Otherwise there's a good chance I forget.

... aand since people think it's weird and antisocial to communicate via e-mail, I end up abusing org-capture. I.e. I have a quick hotkey (C-c c t) to input and save a task directly to the self-organizing system I use, so if people absolutely refuse to send e-mail, they get an "uh, ok, thanks; I've noted it down and will deal with this later" from me, and I don't spend even 5 seconds thinking about it until the time is right.

Re: The Great Productivity Puzzle

#47

Post by joeyo » 

  . If Gordon is right, sagging productivity figures simply reflect 
  . the fact that scientific progress doesn’t have as much impact on 
  . the economy as it once did. Rather than waiting for productivity 
  . growth and wages to rebound of their own accord, Gordon supports 
  . policies designed to expand the size and quality of the labor 
  . force, such as raising the retirement age, letting more 
  . immigrants into the country, and expanding access to higher 
  . education.
Assuming for the moment that Gordon is right about the diagnosis, isn't this remedy exactly backwards? If productivity (per worker?) is down, than surely increasing the size of the labor pool is exactly the wrong medicine and will result productivity per worker to decrease further. Increasing the quality of the labor force through higher education, etc, makes sense. But how can increasing the size of the pool lead to wage increases in the absence of other productivity gains?

Re: The Great Productivity Puzzle

#48

Post by JoBrad »

ldehaan wrote: post #39
Retra wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People really don't communicate as well when they aren't collocated.

that's an uninteresting opinion. I've been communicating solely with people for years, from home, using chat and sometimes video, but usually just text. I don't forget what someone just told me. I have a trail of requests and ideas from clients and coworkers. if necessary I will jump on a phone call for faster data transfer. the office is great for talking to coworkers, which is almost always about non work stuff, vs…

I've worked at a few companies where inter-office communication and remote-worker communication was excellent. But that's not the norm. People tend to make decisions, especially when they're rushed, with those closest to them.

Re: The Great Productivity Puzzle

#49

Post by drusenko »

Productivity increases when you save people time. When a job used to take 2 hours and now it only takes 1, productivity has gone up.

I wonder if the reason productivity is going down is that the current cohort of 2010s technology companies may actually have the opposite aim: consuming people's attention and time.

Things like social networking, advertising supported businesses, mobile gaming, &c., aren't saving people time at all.

Re: The Great Productivity Puzzle

#50

Post by TeMPOraL »

nostromo wrote: post #9
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The economics of info tech are REALLY good except in the official GDP numbers. Take Google, for example. The (economic) value that Google provides to me is far more than I pay for, which is zero. It's even far more than what Google makes from the ads it serves me. Google is capturing as revenue only a small fraction of the value it creates. That (and similar cases) are why much of the info tech economic/productivit…

Well, the official GDP numbers also don't count the value of sunshine and rainbows -- because that's not what they're created to measure. If you get a lot of value from something you pay nothing for, and it doesn't increase your job output in dollars and cents, then there's no reason it should increase GDP.

> If you get a lot of value from something you pay nothing for, and it doesn't increase your job output in dollars and cents, then there's no reason it should increase GDP.

The funny thing is, Google basically enables my job. Good luck searching even on StackOverflow without it. Of course I could program without it, but it wouldn't be the same kind of programming, the projects wouldn't be the same, they wouldn't move that fast. Google is an excellent engine for browsing distributed documentation (i.e. all those random webpages detailing how to use the thing XYZ you need).

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