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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

#601

Post by fragmede »

worthless-trash wrote: post #550
hnick wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

what are those? searching for JBHIFI terminal only brings up a store in Australia of that name selling square POS terminals.

Bloomberg terminals also have a custom keyboard and are essentially a terminal program.

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

#602

Post by sicp-enjoyer »

QuercusMax wrote: post #253
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…

"Fun" fact: the Therac-25 tragedy was in part caused by this type of usage - folks who know it so well they just blast through the screens from memory. But the software in question wasn't resilient to this use-case, and apparently resulted in an inconsistent state.

It sounds like we should consider and test the possibility that users of the software will become extremely familiar and want to use it much more quickly than we anticipate.

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

#603

Post by willhslade »

SoftTalker wrote: post #368
VLM wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The trade off isn't in terms of the order, it's that you get back the time waiting in line behind several very slow people.

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

#604

Post by komali2 »

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.

Regardless of personal beliefs, there's the other issues here. First, what does "massive growth in government" even mean? Do you mean in government meddling in people's personal lives, like restricting bodily autonomy for women or banning books? Yes, I agree. Do you mean in government spending? Sure, agreed, the numbers agree. But you seems to be referring to some other kinda vaguely defined concept of like... government bureaucratic-ness? I'm not really sure what you mean and how to measure what you mean.

The second issue is your overall thesis seems to be "the government is inefficient," which is fine to say and to criticize, it certainly is inefficient by many measures, but I feel like you're hinting at some kind of alternative that I can't possibly guess at. Usually these discussions take two routes: the capitalist one, wherein you argue that private industry is more efficient, which even if we accept that efficiency is the only valid measure of how we should choose to do things (amazon builds road faster and cheaper than government: then puts a toll on it so only the rich are allowed to use it. this is bad), is probably not true[0] or possibly the opposite of the truth. Maybe you're more anarchist in your leanings, in which case you're arguing for more distributed and local management of these kinds of services? That could be a really interesting conversation, is that what you're suggesting?

[0] https://gsdrc.org/document-library/is-the-private-sector-mor...

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

#605

Post by [deleted] »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #263
nradov wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly why many people intentionally avoid testing themselves or their children. If you don't have a positive test then officially you don't have COVID-19 and can continue your normal life (symptoms permitting). (I'm not claiming that this is a good practice necessarily but it's what most parents do.)

They could do home tests though. But PCR would be “on the record”

[deleted]

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

#606

Post by rhaway84773 »

What makes no sense is looking at pandemic increases in productivity and ascribing it to remote work. There were 2 obviously much larger reasons for that increase.

1. At the macro level, the increase was heavily driven by the fact that the least productive jobs were simply not being done. Blue collar workers were not working while white collar workers were.

2. At an individual level a massive increase in productivity was a result of people not having anything else to do so they were working a lot more.

Remote work might have led to an increase in productivity but these 2 factors definitely did. Yet people have been talking as if all the productivity increase was entirely because of remote work when it was almost certainly behind at least these 2 factors.

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

#607

Post by conductr »

beefield wrote: post #275
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…

> never replace a terminal based app, with a GUI based app and expect productivity gains I can imagine this being true. It seems that almost the whole software industry has failed to grasp the distinction between an appliance and a tool. An appliance you expect almost anyone to be able to use without training. A tool, well you are expected to learn how to use it, and after that, you are much more productive than befo…

I like this dichotomy. I'd want to add a third, the product. The product has ego, it needs to look nice, it needs to demo well, it is marketing. This is what the auto industry has become since the model T and it's what software has become since it was a tool. The problem is with software, things like productivity typically take a hit as it moves further from tool to product. More so when the domain is something like EHR or ERP or E anything.

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

#608

Post by troupe »

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…

Was your hospital by any chance using Meditech as the terminal based application?

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

#609

Post by D13Fd »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #263
nradov wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly why many people intentionally avoid testing themselves or their children. If you don't have a positive test then officially you don't have COVID-19 and can continue your normal life (symptoms permitting). (I'm not claiming that this is a good practice necessarily but it's what most parents do.)

They could do home tests though. But PCR would be “on the record”

It depends if you are willing to lie about it. I won't lie.

But the huge, unavoidable disruption that comes from a positive test result certainly doesn't encourage frequent at-home testing. I think at this point most daycare parents test when the school tells them to, and don't test otherwise.

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

#610

Post by sn41 »

deadbunny wrote: post #453
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,…

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.

On a related note: the same is true for Keyboard Macros in Emacs, Vim etc. I often send a bunch of related, but each slightly different from the others, using Emacs keyboard macros and gnus. Felt great the first time I discovered it, saved perhaps 3 hours I would have spent writing and debugging a script.
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