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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

#611

Post by hnick »

sirjaz wrote: post #589
hnick wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You missed privacy. The user lost privacy with webapps.

I figured that came under "easy access to user metrics and data", but I did consider some kind of rhyme linking piracy to privacy but it was a little early in the day to commit that sin. It's probably worth mentioning twice anyway.

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

#612

Post by cad_engineer »

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…

> 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.

just curious, why do you think that is? I spent several years working on project sharing and data visualization features for an architectural CAD program. you could show/hide/recolor all your objects on the fly to emphasize key details, sketch on top of viewports, play around with a clip cube in 3D (personally fixed a lot of bugs with that one...), and sync all your changes back to the main project file to share with colleagues. some of these features were a bit rough around the edges, admittedly, but I always got the impression they were pretty popular with our customers. I'm a little stunned to hear that you and your colleagues just want to print out a couple viewports and look at them on a piece of paper.

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

#613

Post by hnick »

fragmede wrote: post #601
worthless-trash wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah JB Hi-Fi is a local retailer in Aus (guessing it's like a Best Buy but a strong focus on music CDs originally), it's probably a reference to the software the staff uses. Haven't had a chance to look over their shoulder at that one.

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

#614

Post by toofy »

pixl97 wrote: post #361
duderific wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Everything still runs" could be applied in a lot of situations, but it's not necessarily a desirable state. Everything still runs at McDonalds if there are half as many cashiers, but it will take a lot longer to get your Big Mac. Everything still runs at the hospital if there are half as many nurses, but the level of care is much worse. You get the idea.

>Everything still runs at McDonalds if there are half as many cashiers, but it will take a lot longer to get your Big Mac. With the McDs i've went into recently it appears everything still runs even if there are zero cashiers being that you can click your order in a big touchscreen. Turns out that cooks seem more important that cashiers. Course we'll see see how much of that can be replaced by robots in the next few…

i don’t think anyone doubts that certain jobs can be automated away, but what concerns me is how many people point at “lowly cashiers” and gloat “look at how stupidly greedy you’re being by asking for a livable wage you lowly cashier.”

the reality is, companies absolutely will save significantly _more_ money by automating office jobs that cost significantly more than a cashier.

i’m not a luddite. i live, breathe, play in and firmly believe technology has _potential_ to liberate us, but anyone who celebrates that job automation will harm “the poors” but fails to see that obviously companies will automate their expensive mid/high tier employees asap is allowing their class snobbishness to blind them.

everyone in tech is familiar with the joke, “don’t screw with me or i’ll write a bash script that can replace you.”

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

#616

Post by mch82 »

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,…

I love that this comment defines productivity as lunches, jokes, playing board games, and going to the pub. Though, I agree all those things are more fun than sitting at a computer.

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

#617

Post by BigJono »

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…

I did an internship there like 10 years ago at the end of my uni course, where one of my projects was to do a proof of concept of re-implementing their point-of-sale application using web technologies, maintaining the DOS-y look, feel, keyboard shortcuts etc.

At the time I had no idea why. In hindsight, it's hilarious. I'm guessing it was the result of a clash between someone that wanted to use modern tech for the sake of it and someone representing the users that told them to get fucked, probably went through 15 meetings before eventually getting palmed off on the intern so it didn't pick up too much steam (probably the only good decision that was made in the whole process).

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

#618

Post by mch82 »

vlozko wrote: post #25
ep103 wrote: post #7

> 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…

Why is measuring productivity easier to do in the office? Don’t your coworkers have deliverables? How does being in the office make it easier to tell if those deliverables are complete?

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

#619

Post by bloodyplonker22 »

qeternity wrote: post #541
stormbrew wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You were probably downvoted because you made a curt statement with no backing arguments like in this follow-up post.

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

#620

Post by rhaway84773 »

StillBored wrote: post #242
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…

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 think it’s less about the design being bad and more about simplicity as a goal overriding everything else.

So learning an interface is frowned upon. Every interface must be designed as if the user has never seen it before.

Which is ok, as long as there’s also an alternative path which may take time and effort to learn but leads to increased efficiency and productivity.

Unfortunately, that alternate path takes a lot of effort. And worse, it leads to very few extra sales. The company which puts in the effort to build a complex but efficient workflow in addition to the initial easy workflow will get beat in the market by competitors who only focus on the easy workflow that looks great in demos leading to the C-suiters to buy it.

The best example is the pioneer of both these trends. Apple. It used to be that Apple insisted on a single button mouse so the primary interface was extremely easy to use. Yet, it spent a lot of effort including keyboard shortcuts, which were prominently displayed, everywhere. Unlike Windows, which basically only had Ctrl/Alt modifier keys, Apple has had the Ctrl/CMD/Opt modifier keys as integral parts for a very long time, encouraging those shortcuts. Apple also put s lot of effort to make their, and 3rd party applications easily scriptable (the choice of AppleScript however always held this back). The most MS did was VBA for Office.

But once Apple entered the iEra, it realized it didn’t need any of this to sell products anymore. The massive lag in supporting basic keyboard shortcuts on the iPad when using a keyboard is one of the strongest evidence for this.

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