Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

651–660 of 751 posts

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

#651

Post by beambot »

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…

You have to (at least!) account for concurrent edit & access. I remember the hellscape that was emailing files like ProjectPlan_v6_beambotEdits_latest.xls to team members.

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

#652

Post by Eleison23 »

vidanay wrote: post #376
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…

> It was to have a record that is standard, digital, transferable, etc. Considering how often I have to fill out the same goddamn forms (sometimes literally down the hall in the same building as another doctor), I think that goal failed miserably.

No practice or healthcare system accepts anyone else's records. There is supposedly a way for the patient to release records and have them sent around, but none of the doctors I've asked will accept that sort of nonsense. It's "NIH" for healthcare - if they didn't generate the record, they don't want it.

While in the hospital, the phlebotomists came after me for routine lab work at hospital prices. I declined and then I had a conversation with the nurse about releasing my labs from June to them. On script, she said "Mmm, 4 months is kinda old! We'd rather do our own!" so I filled out the ROI anyway, and curiously nobody offered to draw my blood again.

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

#653

Post by autoexec »

Animats wrote: post #537
autoexec wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a problem. It's a dice roll each time a person is infected depending on a huge number of factors including what strain they've been hit with. Reinfections can give worse odds each time. People who got lucky once or twice before might be more careless thinking their luck will continue and end up screwing themselves. https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20220707/each-covid-19-reinf...

"Reinfections can give worse odds each time." Not necessarily worse, but there is cumulative damage. In the UK, about 7% of COVID cases that get medical attention are now re-infections. That number increases with time; it was only 4% last February. Immunity from getting COVID is time-limited and not that long. One study said "time between reinfections ranged from 90 to 650 days, with the average being 343 days". Over…

I'm hoping that over the coming decade we get better defenses. Improved vaccines, treatments, and a greater understanding of the virus could prevent a lot of that harm. It hasn't been long enough to see what the long term consequences of infections or even our vaccines and current treatments will be for that matter, but I'll stay up to date on vaccines and continue taking sensible precautions against catching or spreading the virus. It's the best I can do to help my odds given what we know currently.

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

#654

Post by Eleison23 »

radium3d wrote: post #650
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'm a web developer, and about 2 years ago my company implemented a new note taking policy that takes up a very large portion of my time, makes me feel like I'm untrusted and I just don't feel as happy as I did before. We are required to write a note of everything we do through the day with time spent and submit it by the end of the day. This is in addition to our project management system where we already track our…

When I started my new role with my employer, I did this using a browser extension and a really neat time-tracker app. I forwarded every day's tracking data to my mentor and so he was able to see with a really fine grain what I was working on, and how long each task took me in a given day.

Our apps security policy put the kibosh on that and I had to destroy my account once I realized it would not be feasible to keep it going forward.

My employer is really conservative about allowing 3rd-party apps, which is great for security, and puts us in a veritable Stone Age of productivity.

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

#655

Post by Eleison23 »

willhslade wrote: post #603
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…

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.

You can also order in the app from the comfort of your home, car, bus, sidewalk, thereby skipping the "standing and huffing at the kiosk" scene entirely.

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

#656

Post by jaredhallen »

thebradbain wrote: post #288
maxrev17 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just shitty software though. Good software gets out of the way and improves something. We could speculate on how to fix that scenario, but there's probably no incentive - in my experience there are fixations amongst tech people on profit-less ideas that end up getting squeezed awkwardly into applications such as bill splitting, digital ordering etc.

I completely agree. Software Engineers are no less prone to “when you only know how to use a hammer, everything looks like a nail” as anyone else. There’s so many things we keep trying to shoehorn tech into that don’t need it— electronic ordering/serving food, planning a small gathering of friends, making a smoothie [1], “smart” fridges/toasters/stoves… these are all adding unnecessary knobs and bobbles to things hum…

Having been employed in tech for over 20 years, I have found myself leaning further this way over time. The simplest solution is usually the best.

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

#657

Post by yunwal »

danjoredd wrote: post #339
Mordisquitos wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People in tech keep thinking more tech will solve problems and they keep underestimating the flexibility of the old models. Related to this, but in a completely different context, I have had similar thoughts lately when eating out at restaurants in Spain. It's incredibly frustrating from a customer's point of view when the waiter taking your group's order has to use a newfangled tablet or phone-like device and tap…

What upsets me are those dumb QR Code menus. Battery dead? Out of service? No food for you amigo.

Or if you just don’t have a smartphone. Obviously that’s unthinkable though.

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

#658

Post by djmips »

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 remember that being a key difference between the graphical / modelling software SoftImage and Maya. With the former a TUI and the latter a GUI. The Maya approach won out because getting new people productive quickly was more important than their longer term productivity it seems. Maybe it has something to do with turnover but maybe there are people who can do good creative work but can't adapt to using a TUI or at least are frightened of it.

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

#659

Post by xyst »

Past US workers had the benefits of unions and collective bargaining. 40 hour work weeks. Overtime pay. Paid time off. 5 day work weeks. Decent benefits and pay. You could be the sole source of income for a family of 4 and pay for a suburban lifestyle.

Keep your worker bees happy and they will be productive.

Today, workers have shit pay compared to the CEOs and other C-level executives with multimillion dollar salaries, bonuses, and golden parachutes. Many people work multiple jobs just to pay rent. Unions mostly busted. Erosion of safety nets, and other public services. Those same CEOs even work with other companies in the same industry to artificially keep worker pay as low as possible by having an informal agreement to not recruit and hire from companies that have this agreement.

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

#660

Post by yunwal »

toofy wrote: post #614
pixl97 wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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, pla…

I’m a programmer and honestly really hope that this job gets automated away. Obviously I also hope we figure out how to support people who lose their jobs to automation, but sitting at a computer for 8 hours a day is not how humans were meant to spend their lives.
Post reply on HN