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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

#521

Post by throwaway22032 »

spookthesunset wrote: post #150
throwaway22032 wrote: post #27

I'm pretty sure I know why... The working environment changed. Bit by bit I moved from an environment with gentleman's agreements and so on towards something in which everything was codified, safetyism became rampant, etc. In the UK over the past few years I went from going into a nice office in a number of beautiful old buildings, getting my stuff done with cameraderie, having lunch together and playing board games,…

Exact same boat dude. I miss the before-fore times a lot and still cannot believe how we got to this position. Still trying to figure out whats next for me. This WFH shit is gonna stick around in our industry for a while... and it just isn't compatible with how I function. I have no clue what to do next.

I'm sorry to hear that. It really is difficult.

Just wanted you to know that you're not alone.

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

#522

Post by dleslie »

twobitshifter wrote: post #478
dleslie wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in BC, Canada, many places don't even provide you a menu. You're expected to scan a QR code on the table, then use the website it leads you to. So the table fumbles around with their phones, using a website that usually has a terrible UX, and then the server arrives and enters your order on their tablet. At least they don't require that we install an App. But I'm sure someone's thinking that would be a good idea…

QR codes mean there are no menus to clean off.

It also means analytics for everyone at the table, not just the person who paid and not only their credit card number.

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

#523

Post by mkbgw »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #459
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. My daughter works at Epic, and she explained that one (though not the only one) of the big reasons health care is so expensive is because Drs have so m…

Americans aren't actually don't sure that often, a topic addressed in The Myth of the Litigious Society by David Engel [c.f. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2017/02/01/book-rev...].

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

#524

Post by jimbokun »

badpun wrote: post #296
conductr wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also because it's enterprise software. Which actually isn't software, it's more of a platform. You have to do so much implementation detail that the GUI is just the result of some form-builder type module. Everything I've ever encountered that was enterprise software, felt like it's GUI was not made by humans at all. I don't actually know how they get built but they're almost never optimized for humans or the us…

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.

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

#526

Post by Animats »

AnthonBerg wrote: post #34
cestith wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Indeed. In support of this—part of it!—here’s one paper of many: “The Neurobiology of Long COVID” by M. Monje, neurobiologist at Stanford, and A. Iwasaki, immunologist at Yale. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2022.10.006 People with measurable neurobiological issues will show a measurable productivity drop .

Prevalence of "Long COVID" is hard to measure at this point, but based on symptom reporting, about 15% of people who test positive for COVID have some symptoms more than 2 months later.[1] More data is available for people who have had heart and brain MRI scans, which show inflammation. It may be possible to diagnose this with a special eye exam that detects inflammation in the eye's blood vessels. The tests are still very experimental, but there are objective measures of damage.

[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

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

#527

Post by TeMPOraL »

ddoolin wrote: post #338
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,…

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…

> Most of them would likely stick to Excel if our solutions are more cumbersome (which is a high bar to meet/beat, but rightfully so)

Tying this back to the top-level comment: at some point I've realized that so many SaaS would be better off as an Excel sheet, because they're fundamentally just a slower, buggier, much less productive and uglier version of one. But the point isn't efficiency and empowerment. The point is control: the SaaS forces the user to a specific workflow. One that makes it easier for developers to develop (by constraining the problem space), or for company to monetize, or for corporate to retain legibility - but rarely to actually help the end-user.

As an end user from a generation that was taught Excel and MS Access at school, I'd go as far as saying that 50+% of web applications I use would be an order of magnitude more useful if the UX was that of Excel or Access.

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

#528

Post by zepppotemkin »

fintechjock wrote: post #236
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…

Maybe an even simpler explanation is that productively is roughly calculated as GDP / employed workers. Productivity almost always goes up in a recession, especially one accompanied with massive layoffs (like early COVID). Productivity is going down right now compared to 2020 because we are pretty much at full employment. These productivity measurements aren’t really tracking individual productivity at all.

Are you sure it isn't the design of the GUIs in tools HNers have vague insights into?

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

#529

Post by [deleted] »

scarface74 wrote: post #505
asvitkine wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't productivity from better UI be something measurable that can be then advertised by vendors and extrapolated into savings for the customer? I feel like that could be a pretty compelling selling point to the CxOs.

How do you measure how much MS Teams sucks compared to Slack? All the CTO knows is that they have an enterprise license for Office along with Teams and the salesperson they talked to showed them how great it integrates with the rest of the suite. In the EHR space, all the CMO (chief medical officer) cares about is it helps keep them in compliance. Why should they care if it’s hard for their office staff to use?

[deleted]

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

#530

Post by [deleted] »

yamtaddle wrote: post #117
coldpie wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But is it just me? No. I go into the office every day because I feel the same. I need to get out of the house and see people. (It is OK if you, reader, do not feel this way! People are different!) There's a handful of other folks who come in every day. I'm starting up a project this week to revive our office culture a bit, to try to spring back from the COVID devastation.

I think a lot of us work-from-home preferrers also like (good) offices better than WFH, just not to the tune of hundreds of dollars and tens of hours lost per month.

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