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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

#541

Post by qeternity »

stormbrew wrote: post #113
qeternity wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not how productivity is defined or measured.

I'm really curious how you think it's defined or measured then. I'm obviously abstracting a bit, but a lot of people in the replies here seem to think it's related to how much time you spend watching cat videos on company time and it's definitely not that.

It has nothing to do with what I think. Another commenter has already posted the definition from the Fed (FRED).

Productivity is not a measure of prices, profitability or anything similar. It’s a measure of output per unit of input.

Classic HN downvote fest because people incorrectly disagree with a factual post.

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

#542

Post by fny »

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…

And we still have GDP growth and no real signs of recession.

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

#543

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

weberer wrote: post #41
slowhand09 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets not discount the people who populate the reddit/r/antiwork forum. Noting like wasting oxygen the rest of the world needs.

I never heard about them until I saw that news interview. What a wild ride. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yUMIFYBMnc

I think part of the issue is that it had its reputation destroyed destroyed almost as quickly as it was built. It was fascinating to watch it unfold.

I do not believe for one second that the person selected for this interview was a good representative for the cause ( although I am sure there are some goofballs, who can't seem to present a coherent case even on hostile territory that is Fox News ). I did not follow story that closely, but I believe the person that took the interview got serious blowback from its reddit friends.

The sad thing is a lot of people will form their entire opinion of it based on this one interview. To me it is OWS all over again ( I do not count BLM as that since it had Democrat political machine, and later business machine, backing ).

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

#544

Post by Animats »

krater23 wrote: post #391
AnthonBerg wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many, many scientists who are attempting to warn us that isn’t nothing. The literature is piling up. Paper: Immunological dysfunction persists for 8 months following initial mild-to-moderate SARS-CoV-2 infection – https://doi.org/10.1038/s41590-021-01113-x Paper: “Excess risk for acute myocardial infarction mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic” — https://doi.org/10.1002/jmv.28187 Paper: “p53/NF-kB Balance…

I would not wonder if you throw so much research time to a normal flu you will find similar things.

People do study that. There's known to be a significantly increased risk of heart attack and stroke in people who have recovered from influenza, but that risk returns to baseline after about two months. The big risk is in the first 7 days.[1]

[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1702090

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

#545

Post by Frost1x »

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…

>I don’t think productivity was ever the goal of this software.

I'm not entirely sure about this. During the early digitization era productivity was a big driver. Modern word processors are a godsend if you've ever tried to typewrite a document for publication (forget anything with complex formulae) or dealt with actual physical spreadsheets? Office itself and it's now many clones is a fantastic set of tools for productivity.

My opinion is that we've created a world in technology now that drives technology for the sake of tech and financial drivers. I regularly deal with people who think it would be a great idea to build a system to automate some aspect of business that's already well optimized or generalize something they thing is general but is really quite niche.

There are certainly cases where it makes sense to develop a system around something but you need to consider the full cost/benefit tradeoffs, not just benefits which industry tends to do.

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

#547

Post by 0xRusty »

sinecure wrote: post #436
xab33 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree. Where I work, in-person work became optional. Strangely, everyone 35 or younger decided to work from home (most of them don't have kids, which would be the one decent excuse), but the older people mostly come in. At 34, I'm sort of in-between, but enjoyed bantering with people my age or younger. So I get the worst of both worlds: my boss can still come in my office at any random time and bug me about…

This has been my experience as well at 32. The commercial real estate firm I work at has a 4 days in the office policy, so we have a fairly robust social atmosphere. You can't design a building on a webinar, you need to sit together in a conference room, roll the blueprints out on the table and point to things, sketch changes, review pro formas.. it can't be replaced digitally. The young people we're getting are like…

I agree, and adding to this another thing I find now is it's very very hard to spot young talent now if they're fully remote. In a team of 100+ people how can I remember who's performing well, who's good at certain tasks etc when all you are to me is a muted microphone and an avatar with no camera showing. Working in an office with others post COVID isn't about what we're asking you to do, it's about what you bring to the table and offer others. Communication problems among the younger workers (I mean lets say under 25 who've hardly worked in an office before because of covid) are a real problem now. Some don't know how to act, how to behave, how to muck in and be part of a professional workforce with people who have 10, 20, 30 years more experience than them.

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

#548

Post by lamontcg »

kennend3 wrote: post #46
weberer wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never heard about them until I saw that news interview. What a wild ride. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yUMIFYBMnc

antiwork started off good but quickly went downhill. I abandoned it some time ago because it is now a "pro-union eco-chamber". I once advocated serious changes to the labour laws are what is needed, and was inundated with "join a union" posts. It really speaks to just how out-of-touch these people are. Unions only care about large corporations because they can get a lot of members and union dues. The issue with this…

> I once advocated serious changes to the labour laws are what is needed, and was inundated with "join a union" posts.

Strong unions are the way to get changes in labor laws and how to get collective action.

If we could all just magically come together without any organizational structure in order to effect change in the government and laws we would have already gotten it done.

There isn't a way out that doesn't involve organized collective action and something that looks very much like unions. Individualism doesn't work to effect the kinds of changes that are necessary.

People were inundating you telling you that you needed a Union because what you want is a magical pony, and unfortunately you're the one that is out-of-touch (although in another sense you're not at all out-of-touch since most people believe that there simply MUST be some way to effect change without collective action--which continues to fail but nobody will give up on the dream).

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

#549

Post by TeMPOraL »

hnick wrote: post #516
mike_hearn wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Glad you pointed that out. And, in the most prevalent application of Conway's law[0], those changes enabled and are entrenched by the "agile" practices in software development. Incremental work, continuous deployment, endless bugfixing and webapps fit each other like a glove (the latex kind that's used for deep examination of users' behavior).

It also enables data siloes and prevents any app from becoming a commodity - making software one of the strongest supplier-driven markets out there, which is why the frequent dismissal of legitimate complaints, "vote with your feet/wallet", does not work.

----

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

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

#550

Post by worthless-trash »

hnick wrote: post #504
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 feel like the push to make software accessible (in a new-user, not disability, context) and intuitive has made complexity the enemy. Instead of having software that grows with the user's capability, features are hidden from the top layer of interactivity or just cut entirely. I was at the post office here in Australia a few years ago and saw the screen. It was one of those DOS-era full screen red and blue text inte…

For future reference (and anyone following along later), that is an "ncurses" terminal application.

You should see the customized JBHIFI terminal + keyboard.

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