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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

#481

Post by pixl97 »

WalterBright wrote: post #440
pixl97 wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please stop being the highlight of zero sum thinking. Let's make up a hypothetical example. The government says you have to install a safety rail and the amortized cost is $1 a year. You: OMG, this is going to cost $100 over the next century, a huge loss, I am destroyed. Reality: Johnny doesn't fall of the equipment being coming paralyzed (costing you an immediate $200 in lawsuit and payout fees) and is able to produ…

Here ya go (not a hypothetical example): https://slate.com/business/2022/10/san-francisco-toilet-mill... They beat out Seattle, that spent $250,000 on a portable toilet a few years ago. On my own street, the city water outfit installed a fire hydrant. It cost $10,000, including architectural drawings of the installation. When the crew came out to install the hydrant (the main water line runs under my property) I aske…

The guy installing the meter was told where to install it, they are not the architect that make sure it actually works if they install top many so it's not a surprise.

It's no different than me 20 years ago installing a server for a client. I would go out slap it in and turn it on. I did not architect the applications on it, nor configure the firewall rules on the router for it to work.

News articles are written about exceptional things, not the mundane.

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

#482

Post by dougmwne »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #405
dfxm12 wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just the corporation friendly mass media trying to combat calls for better worker treatment/compensation. This is just the next single from the album that brought us "quiet quitting", "the great resignation", "millennials are lazy", etc. It's important for the backers of these media outlets to float these stories out there, lest anyone become sympathetic to workers in light of the facts that minimum wage hasn't…

Also the cries for returning to the office

Literally one of these on the front page of the NYT today, fully of chirpy anecdotes about people ditching the sweatpants and silly comments about how much our dogs will miss us when we go back to "real work".

You may kindly shove it, NYT. I'm not going back.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/29/technology/return-to-offi...

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

#483

Post by Smoosh »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #264
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…

>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). Eve…

Back in the late '80s the government department I worked at had a dedicated data entry team with their own system (hardware and all).

The greenscreen data entry was highly optimised to not even require tabbing to different fields, but just run the values together in a large single field and the software would split them into fields and validate them.

I assume it was very fast and efficient for the experienced operators.

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

#484

Post by WheelsAtLarge »

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…

Insightful...

Figuring out the right amount of automation in business is hard. Too much automation makes the company too rigid to the point of breaking but too little reduces productivity. This is a dilemma that factories/companies have to constantly re-learn. We see it regularly. A new manager comes in and decides that a company can save a truck load of money by completely automating production. But soon finds out that there are too many variables in life and that total automation can't work. The goal should be to find the sweet spot that produces the maximum while being flexible to change. But I don't think this is why productivity is dropping.

I suspect it's related to the reduction of reliance on foreign factories. The US wants to reduce the reliance on foreign manufacturing and bring all of that production back to the US. That will take time, capital and ability to learn how to do the work here. That will hit productivity hard. All than change won't happen cost free in terms of productivity and assets. The change started a few years ago. We are beginning to see the result.

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

#485

Post by jessaustin »

phone8675309 wrote: post #425
jjk166 wrote: post #362

US Worker productivity is 0.7 standard deviations below its average over the last 3 years. It is 3.6% below all time high. It is higher now than at any point before July of 2020. YOY Productivity growth has dipped negative and then went back to positive 20 times in the past 22 years. To be concerned about the current level of productivity requires either the attention span or the intelligence of a goldfish. https://t…

The Washington Post is Bezos's mouthpiece - lower worker productivity hurts his bottom line so we have to suffer through his paper complaining about it.

Also Bezos would like to normalize the intense surveillance, speed focus, and corner-cutting that leads his warehouses to have injury rates 80% higher than the rest of the industry.

https://thesoc.org/amazon-primed-for-pain/

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

#486

Post by aidenn0 »

jjk166 wrote: post #362

US Worker productivity is 0.7 standard deviations below its average over the last 3 years. It is 3.6% below all time high. It is higher now than at any point before July of 2020. YOY Productivity growth has dipped negative and then went back to positive 20 times in the past 22 years. To be concerned about the current level of productivity requires either the attention span or the intelligence of a goldfish. https://t…

> To be concerned about the current level of productivity requires either the attention span or the intelligence of a goldfish.

It seems like the median journalistic piece assumes this of the reader anyways?

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

#487

Post by elihu »

jjk166 wrote: post #362

US Worker productivity is 0.7 standard deviations below its average over the last 3 years. It is 3.6% below all time high. It is higher now than at any point before July of 2020. YOY Productivity growth has dipped negative and then went back to positive 20 times in the past 22 years. To be concerned about the current level of productivity requires either the attention span or the intelligence of a goldfish. https://t…

> "In the first half of 2022, productivity — the measure of how much output in goods and services an employee can produce in an hour — plunged by the sharpest rate on record going back to 1947, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics."

It annoys me that an article about a big drop in workplace productivity doesn't actually say how big the drop is. If it's only 3.6%, then that explains why they glossed over that part, as it would have undermined their narrative.

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

#488

Post by acdha »

nemo44x wrote: post #392
dcolkitt wrote: post #128

The very important context is that productivity sharply rose in 2020, in the middle of the Covid recession. The recent drop in productivity is mostly just a return to pre-pandemic baseline. The simplest explanation is probably just that the workers who were laid off during Covid were the least productive, and so average worker output went up, then fell as they re-entered the labor force. Or maybe even just there was…

Similar things happened during the Great Depression. Many things made in that era before the war are highly sought after since the craftsmen who had jobs at the time were often among the best in their field. Musical instruments from the 30’s are legendary.

Yale’s new employee tour was like that, too. They walked us around campus and one of the things they highlighted was how much nicer the Depression-era stuff was than the decades before or after because the amount planned suddenly bought a lot more and they apparently had a windfall in the form of top-notch Italian stone workers who’d immigrated because the job market was even worse back home.

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

#489

Post by P5fRxh5kUvp2th »

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…

This resonates strongly and I'm surprised more people aren't talking about it.

I recognized this problem in the 90's because I worked at a manufacturing plant where the software, even then, was getting in the way of workers needing to do something a bit non-standard (they developed workarounds over time).

It's also why I'm a big fan of the 80% solution, I think there's a level of hubris involved in going for the 100% solution for everything.

To your point about trust, it's something I've been thinking about recently. Not trust, but the authoritarian nature of software, which expresses itself and is purchased for the ability to distrust. You'll see this in things like debates about whether or not developers should be allowed to affect the deployment via yaml files or not. What makes it difficult is there is often a legitimate need for these sorts of systems, especially for regulatory compliance, but more often than not they just get in the way of actual work.

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

#490

Post by blooalien »

gonzo41 wrote: post #467
ddoolin wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you. Although I don't think it's incompetence so much as laziness. Not just "too lazy to make a good UI" but "too lazy to find out what makes a UI good." I've seen so many coworkers happy to slap some basic form together and expect that to be good enough. I'm constantly writing UI for sports teams who do not at all like to waste time with these kind of fiddly UI elements and flows. Most of them would lik…

So what you're saying is HTML5 and server side rendering should be the go to before any client side junk.

I dunno if they are saying that, but I wholeheartedly endorse this idea. Add the "client side junk" (fancy Javascript stuff, etc.) as enhancement on top for those who want it after the required functionality is being properly and reliably served by the "core technologies". Serve the need properly first, then make it "nice".
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