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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

#631

Post by quadrifoliate »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #73
sylens wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that, but sometimes even the threat of an outbreak can hamper the availability of childcare. Last winter, a few staff members were exposed to a close contact, so they held them out of work as a precaution - but that resulted in one of the rooms having to close for a week.

I assume the parents and staff at my daycare just have a collective unspoken agreement to not test for covid. The remaining Covid policies are stupidly inconsistent anyway. RSV is far more dangerous to children, but that is allowed to go unchecked. Hell, you have to pay $250+ just to get tested for it. Rhinovirus/influenza/norovirus/rotavirus/other coronaviruses are all OK, with kids leaking from both nostrils in the…

> Covid tests are paid for by government, but testing for all the other viruses costs hundreds of dollars? What a farce.

None of the other viruses have caused a pandemic, and changed the course of human history (except influenza, but that was almost a century ago).

Have people literally forgotten that entire countries' health systems were overwhelmed by this virus? Seems like it would be prudent to keep infected individuals out of our public school systems for a few more years.

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

#633

Post by int_19h »

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.

What you describe is the natural outcome of having a single message loop with synchronous handlers, and describes e.g. Win32 just as well - a sequence of keys would simply end up as the corresponding sequence of window messages in the queue, and processed in order.

Where we partially lost that is when UX started to get async. It's not fundamentally incompatible with well-ordered input messages, but in practice, people who write async code all too often forget that it's async all the way (and not just for their favorite scenario). And so you get travesties such as textboxes that let you type text into them, and then erase all that when the app or the page is "fully loaded".

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

#634

Post by kcplate »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #527
ddoolin wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you. Although I don't think it's incompetence so much as laziness. Not just "too lazy to make a good UI" but "too lazy to find out what makes a UI good." I've seen so many coworkers happy to slap some basic form together and expect that to be good enough. I'm constantly writing UI for sports teams who do not at all like to waste time with these kind of fiddly UI elements and flows. Most of them would lik…

> Most of them would likely stick to Excel if our solutions are more cumbersome (which is a high bar to meet/beat, but rightfully so) Tying this back to the top-level comment: at some point I've realized that so many SaaS would be better off as an Excel sheet , because they're fundamentally just a slower, buggier, much less productive and uglier version of one. But the point isn't efficiency and empowerment. The poin…

> Tying this back to the top-level comment: at some point I've realized that so many SaaS would be better off as an Excel sheet

I preach this all the time. Anyone who has to enter data really wants excel and not the fancy wizardized stepped workflow that seems to be the norm nowadays

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

#635

Post by int_19h »

mschuster91 wrote: post #299
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,…

> IMHO, this is because the people writting GUI's these days are mostly incompetent, or hamstrung by "web" technologies. The latter is definitely not the problem. Even the Twitter re-design from a couple years back still supports all the old hotkeys. All it takes to at least support a tab-based workflow is using the "tabindex" property if your form isn't logically laid out already, and the rest can be done by capturi…

Modern web culture is very much the problem. The tech can be keyboard-friendly, sure... but in practice, even the most basic stuff, like Enter to submit forms, is often not working because the "Submit" button is not a proper button, but a bunch of JS.

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

#636

Post by roflyear »

coldpie wrote: post #35
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,…

> But is it just me? No. I go into the office every day because I feel the same. I need to get out of the house and see people. (It is OK if you, reader, do not feel this way! People are different!) There's a handful of other folks who come in every day. I'm starting up a project this week to revive our office culture a bit, to try to spring back from the COVID devastation.

I wouldn't want to force you to stay home, just don't force people to go into the office :)

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

#637

Post by steve76 »

fundad wrote: post #421
forrest2 wrote: post #276

Anecdote: I'm a midwesterner and half of my siblings, most of my wife's siblings, and some of my friends' siblings are in their late 20s, have no jobs (or From the outside, they look nervous / afraid to try to get into the job market or to date people. Men & women, but it leans men. The ones in poorer families stay home all day and play video games, and the richer ones venture out to spend their parent's money at res…

Not In The Labor force is a huge phenomenon and has been since before pandemic. I don’t think it’s just pockets I think there is a widespread cultural aversion to sacrifice now for yourself and your future kids. If your local economy is in decline, you see more people demoralized and jobs dry up in a cycle. I think I read the term “futureless generation” recently and that stuck with me.

No post body was provided.

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

#639

Post by int_19h »

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,…

One other thing about the 90s data entry TUIs - we had very good tools that were specifically optimized for that, both in terms of ease of use for the developer, and in terms of efficiency for the end user of the resulting app. Remember dBase, Clipper, FoxPro etc?

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

#640

Post by happymellon »

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,…

> IMHO, this is because the people writting GUI's these days are mostly incompetent, or hamstrung by "web" technologies.

Completely agree with all of this.

Adding that it's not even web technologies that can't be used. My work Mac had an issue with a Bluetooth mouse, removing and adding a Bluetooth device with the keyboard is basically impossible using tab as nothing gets highlighted to show you switched to it and some of the crucial parts don't get toggled through.

Modern GUIs are absolutely not fit for purpose.

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