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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

#511

Post by WalterBright »

pixl97 wrote: post #481
WalterBright wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 abou…

I saw the drawings. As an engineer, I can assert they were completely custom made and completely unnecessary. You don't need architectural drawings to determine if the flow is sufficient.

Besides, everyone knew the flow was sufficient because it would be the only hydrant upstream of a flow reducer in the main line. I.e. there was plenty of pressure in the line.

The drawings were completely superfluous to a bog-standard install.

> News articles are written about exceptional things

That's true. The hydrant wasn't in the news. Want another one that wasn't exceptional enough to make the news? A nearby one mile stretch of road has been undergoing repaving for THREE YEARS now.

BTW, did you read the article about SF? It blames the permitting process which takes forever and $$$$. That affects everything in SF.

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

#512

Post by civilized »

My theory: increasing dominance of bad productivity ideas that seem good on paper.

The execs love how cheap their GCCs in India are, but they're somehow unaware that these folks can take months to do tasks that should take less than an hour.

That and the exponentially growing parasite of tech-enabled bureaucracy, but we already knew that.

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

#513

Post by DontchaKnowit »

pdntspa wrote: post #331
Retric wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That documentation time is largely driven by the insurance industry which was really painful before these systems. It’s almost shocking how much more productive doctors are inside the VA.

I am seeing all this blah blah blah about how everything pins down to insurance. But if medical pricing was such that insurance wasn't required, then patients would better audit their own care receipts and this fraud issue would eliminate itself, and as a side benefit we'd have sane pricing for medical care.

Word. Insurance is the greatest scam of all time.

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

#514

Post by [deleted] »

shadowgovt wrote: post #506
WalterBright wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anecdotes I gave real examples, not hypotheticals. I never said government spending was zero-sum. > That hydrant was probably too expensive The bill was $10,000 for a $3,000 job. > The damage if a fire breaks out and no municipal fire system is available in a modern city is catastrophic. At $10,000 a pop there'll be a lot fewer hydrants installed, and hence greater risk of catastrophic fire.

Anecdotes aren't hypotheticals; they're single data points with insufficient signal to predict a trend or pattern.

[deleted]

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

#515

Post by soulofmischief »

johndhi wrote: post #502
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…

As someone who worked in the electronic health records industry, closely with design teams, and has thought more deeply about certain aspects of this problem than anyone else in history (not exaggerating), I think you're missing major factors. First, yes, productivity was one of the goals of the forced move to electronic health records systems. The federal government passed the HITECH Act in 2009 creating economic in…

What do you see as the way out of this mess?

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

#516

Post by hnick »

mike_hearn wrote: post #265
Underqualified wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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 of the user.

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

#517

Post by WalterBright »

shadowgovt wrote: post #506
WalterBright wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anecdotes I gave real examples, not hypotheticals. I never said government spending was zero-sum. > That hydrant was probably too expensive The bill was $10,000 for a $3,000 job. > The damage if a fire breaks out and no municipal fire system is available in a modern city is catastrophic. At $10,000 a pop there'll be a lot fewer hydrants installed, and hence greater risk of catastrophic fire.

Anecdotes aren't hypotheticals; they're single data points with insufficient signal to predict a trend or pattern.

You can believe the government is efficient if you like. The fact remains that there's been massive growth in government, and that is going to be paid for out of the economy.

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

#518

Post by shadowgovt »

WalterBright wrote: post #517
shadowgovt wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotes aren't hypotheticals; they're single data points with insufficient signal to predict a trend or pattern.

You can believe the government is efficient if you like. The fact remains that there's been massive growth in government, and that is going to be paid for out of the economy.

Maybe I've just spent too many years in government contracting, but when I hear that a government program is growing, I hear economic stimulus, not pulling something out of the economy.

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

#520

Post by bigcat12345678 »

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.

What's the source?

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