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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

#571

Post by chiefalchemist »

dougmwne wrote: post #482
ryanwaggoner wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Years ago the NYT was great. Now it's so cringy that half the time you wonder if it was hacked / hijacked by TMZ. Sadly, in terms of trust and credibility TMZ wins. It's never anything less or more than it promises to be. If only other media outlets were as honest and had as much integrity.

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

#572

Post by Aperocky »

SapporoChris wrote: post #567
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 memorization and strict adherence to past ways of doing things killed me as a developer. I was tasked with maintaining and customizing an Enterprise Resource Planning system. It was a terminal based app. Sometimes system upgrades would add a field to a screen. For example, perhaps country code was added, split from the phone number in the customer screen. I would frequently be requested to suppress the upgrade,…

But CLI apps should be extensible in the same way that .bashrc is.

If it can't be upgraded, it's not because of its a terminal app, it's because it's poorly designed.

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

#573

Post by TeMPOraL »

yamtaddle wrote: post #438
SoftTalker wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Our nearest McDonalds has a Siri-like virtual assistant thing taking orders at the drive-through. They've had to add taped-on paper notes telling people what it expects them to say to end the order. If you order anything with a number in the name, it may give you that many of it instead of one of it. I don't know how well it does at modifying mistakes but I'd bet the answer is "it can't, it just tells you to pull for…

> They've had to add taped-on paper notes telling people what it expects them to say to end the order.

Voice assistants are still stuck at that 90% point of "good enough to be impressive, bad enough to not work in practice". The selling point of free-form voice recognition is that you don't have to learn the language of the computer. I still believe this is bullshit. You have to do it anyway, but there are no references for it. Hell, even the developers don't know what the "language of the computer" is, because it's defined as "whatever the ML model doesn't choke on".

It would be much better if we stuck to structured natural-language queries with controlled vocabulary[0]. People would quickly pick up on it, and even if it sounded a bit artificial (not much worse than interacting with voice assistants sounds anyway), it would at least work.

> Like "automated" checkouts, they're not automation, they're just making customers do more work than paid workers used to, to achieve the same outcome. The work's still happening, and is less efficient, the businesses just aren't having to pay for it. That's not automation.

The older I get the more I see it, that it's literally most software in a nutshell. Starting with Office suite - yes, the word processors, calendars and spreadsheets - that killed dedicated secretarial jobs and distributed the work they did evenly across everyone.

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[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_vocabulary

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

#575

Post by rpmisms »

cersei wrote: post #553

Probably the long-term effects of COVID which causes exhaustion, brain fog, depression, etc... Combined perhaps by people having had time to reset and reflect on their life. Combined by the fact that the planet and democracy are dying. These are theories of course, but I don't think one has to always look for very complex or technology related answers.

I haven't noticed any direct effects from my three bouts of COVID, but I have noticed a general decline after not being allowed out of my house for 8 months straight.

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

#576

Post by TeMPOraL »

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 they can data-mine you and upsell you crap. The tech stack is outsourced to some shady third party, and you either get a shitty webapp, or a PDF not suitable for mobile, because the restaurants still occasionally need the paper menu, and why do the work twice.

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

#577

Post by QuarterReptile »

supertrope wrote: post #190
derbOac wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insurance is part of it, but not all of it. Government regulation is also a big part. EHR mandates under the Obama administration (? who I was generally supportive of, so not a criticism of his presidency in general) created a kind of "false pressure" to move to EHR immediately, rather than "naturally" adopt it at an organic pace, adopting whatever is most beneficial due to demand. I'm not anti EHR, but the way those…

To play devil's advocate without the stick of Medicare funding being at stake, doctor's offices and hospitals will defer EHR upgrades until the heat death of the universe. HIPAA was passed in the 90s with a safe harbor for faxing and that's still the standard method to transfer a medical record.

I admit I don't know HIPAA very well, but could it be that the requirements for fixing are straightforward, or significantly more so than for other methods? If I'm the lawyer with a role in HIPAA compliance, I want the staff using a no-liability compliance appliance, not screwing up with email attachments in the clear or botching veracrypt containers or anything like that. Simple training: medical records go back on the shelf, in the shredder, or in the fax machine.

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

#578

Post by sippeangelo »

api wrote: post #422
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,…

GUIs have really profoundly regressed. Go ready any UI design book from the 80s or 90s. As you say the web is a culprit but so is attempting to shoehorn mobile designs into desktop.

Could you recommend some well acclaimed older UI design books? I’m interested to learn what we’ve lost!

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

#579

Post by martindbp »

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 has crept into schools as well. At many (most?) preschools around here have apps to document the kids' day, they send out almost daily emails and reminders about various things. If you have kids at preschool, regular school and after-school centers you're getting a constant deluge of information. Add to it that they all have different apps that don't work well (schedule, attendance etc), so of course they use email in addition.

I love our current preschool precisely because they use very little technology: we actually talk to the teachers during drop-off and pick-up if needed, and get maybe one email a month. Their expressed philosphy is to be "present" with the kids and spend as little time as possible on other (administrative) things.

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

#580

Post by toss1 »

bombcar wrote: post #416
toss1 wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds about right For those that seemed to transfer successfully, I noted that at Mayo Clinic, the doctors use live dictation software and dictate at least some of their notes into the system while the patient is present near the end. This immediate review sometimes brings up a few new questions (from either Dr or patient), and a bit more notetaking. So, it looks like a very efficient system. They also have no appar…

Dictating while the patient is there is brilliant, because it double-checks both the doctor and the patient's understanding of what happened.

Yes, I thought so too

Edit: Also, I was generally quite impressed with their notes

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