561–570 of 751 posts
The protocol of working and the order of things is just more fucked up these days than it was in the past.
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…
Good thing I have both.
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They also fought it because they didn't go to medical school and survive residency to fill out forms all damn day—and they didn't used to have to, they had staff for that. Then the computerized systems "replaced" that staff but all that really means is they cut the human time needed low enough that full-time workers weren't needed, but didn't eliminate it, so now that's another thing doctors have to do themselves. AF…
> AFAI can tell, the effect of tech overall is to cut some jobs while making the remaining ones harder and more stressful, while increasing so-called context switching. 100% agree. The Office suite is, in some ways, the worst thing that happened to corporations. Thanks to computers, everyone can now easily write a report, fill in a spreadsheet, or manage their meetings. Which means that everyone now has to write repo…
You're not the only one with that bait and switch feeling.
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That will only be a speed-up if the time saved from easier information retrieval is smaller than the time spent in increased paperwork, which it may or may not be, but is an assertion that needs justification. In general, I'll note producing documentation is fairly slow and tedious. It takes something like an order of magnitude longer to write a sentence than to read it. So this optimization is only going to be a pro…
> easier information retrieval is smaller than the time spent in increased paperwork What paperwork creation increased as a result of digital record use? I'm beginning to think y'all are conflating the increase of documentation with the use of digitalization. The two aren't mutually exclusive.
I think what we're talking about is a clear (if non-typical) example of the Jevons paradox[0]. Digitalization makes creating and processing paperwork more efficient, allowing the overall organization as a system to support/afford more of it. As a result, amount of documentation and form filling increases.
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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,…
In my experience the rise of GUIs over TUIs they lost the command buffering. If you knew what you were doing with a well designed TUI you could hit a sequence of keys that would be buffered and "replayed" as the next screen(s) loaded. Hit a sequence of commands in a GUI and they'll just get lost after the first one as the app/website loads.
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> But you could probably reduce the paperwork that doctors do these days by a factor of 4 and not loose anything of value. Maybe, but this sounds like some vague hunch based on ???. I very highly doubt the healthcare industry would tolerate doctors wasting ~37.5% of their time (75% of paperwork time is wasteful * 50% of doctors' time spent on paperwork = minimum 37.5% of doctors time wasted). Doctors are expensive ,…
>I very highly doubt the healthcare industry would tolerate doctors wasting ~37.5% of their time (75% of paperwork time is wasteful * 50% of doctors' time spent on paperwork = minimum 37.5% of doctors time wasted). Doctors are expensive, so recouping anywhere near 40% of their time would be a priority. Doctors are expensive, but malpractice lawsuits are more expensive. Documentation is extremely important for lawsuit…
I am sorry, have you been in the workplace in the past 20 years and have you tried adding up all the meeting that get shoved into your calendar? I am lucky if 50% of my day is not taken away from me
To imply that someone from higher up wouldn't tolerate' that most of my time is spent in meetings is simply laughable, they are the ones creating them!
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…
As the company customized more and more of the code base, upgrades to the system became more and more difficult. Every upgrade required a manual comparison of custom code to be merged with the baseline code. This led to skipped upgrades, and eventually a cessation of upgrades. Of course, after no upgrades over a long period of time it was eventually decided to move to a new ERP system.
I am still appalled at the things sacrificed to prevent disruption of a small group of peoples work flow.
> 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. > The productivity plunge is perplexing, because productivity took off to levels not seen in decades when the coronavirus pandemic forced an overnight switch to remote work…
I'm of the opinion that WFH has been a net negative to productivity. Measuring productivity was much easier for managers to do when everyone was in the office as employees would find it more difficult to hide attempts at slacking off. Those who are less productive when WFH are less willing to admit it and I believe it's the reason why whenever the topic of WFH comes up, it's drowned by the voices of all those who say…
I honestly do not count "is he in chair staring at screen" as productivity. I count successfully finished projects as such, which brings to question what those managers are trying to measure if they are clearly failing so badly at this. I said before and I will say it again. Managers in US had an easy ride for the past 7 or so decades. Now they are actually asked to work instead of 'managing by walking' and they can't handle it. They need 'throw away their skill set due to Covid'. See twin trail of tears in my eyes?
Managers have all the tools they need and then some. The sheer amount of corporate monitoring software on corporate lappy is beyond astounding. Our manager does not seem to care, but I am horrified to think what other managers use it for. It is very, very intrusive. In other words, if managers can't measure even with those ridiculous and invasive tools at their disposal, what are they doing exactly?
Satya may be repeating what the managers are saying, but managers are saying that they have to actually work for morale and motivation. The horror.
Well, is it not manager's job to motivate and coach the less productive employee?
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…
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…
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Classic business process mistake of trying to change a verbal contract into a form-letter. "I'd like a quarter pounder with cheese and fries" is utterly unacceptable for buying a house or taking out a car loan, but it's the ideal way to order lunch. The people marketing, designing, and writing the application software have never worked in the business, of course, lack of experience has never made people like that pau…
Exactly why I cannot stand using the kiosks to order food at a fast-food restaurant. They take what used to be a five-second process to verbally state an order, and turn it into a multi-minute agony of taps, reading, canceling suggested upsells, etc. before finally getting to completion. I guess the restaurant saves having to pay a person at the counter to take the orders, at the expense of massive customer frustrati…
This is how the restaurant chain deploying those kiosks sees it.
> the restaurant saves having to pay a person at the counter to take the orders, at the expense of massive customer frustration to the point where I hardly ever go to these places anymore
This is self-correcting over time, as more and more places adopt such systems. It's just another supplier-driven market. Fast-food restaurant meals are not really commodities. If I'm in a mood for, say, a McDonald's cheeseburger, there is no other vendor I can get it from[0], so I'm going to suffer through the kiosk experience. It's calibrated to be just about bearable enough that I'm not going to skip the meal because of it.
Everything seems to become more and more like this, in every market - burgers, fridges, cars, phones, webapps, everything. As annoying and abusive as possible without making it a deal-breaker, offered on a supplier-driven market, so the non-annoying, non-abusive alternatives don't exist.
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[0] - Yes, Burger King next door may have similar cheeseburgers, but they feel and taste different enough to be non-substitutable. But even if, guess what, they also have those stupid kiosks.