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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

#671

Post by Gravityloss »

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,…

Think how bad it's going to get when UX designers have only used phones and tablets.

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

#672

Post by 6stringmerc »

xnx wrote: post #559
jjk166 wrote: post #362

US Worker productivity is 0.7 standard deviations below its average over the last 3 years. It is 3.6% below all time high. It is higher now than at any point before July of 2020. YOY Productivity growth has dipped negative and then went back to positive 20 times in the past 22 years. To be concerned about the current level of productivity requires either the attention span or the intelligence of a goldfish. https://t…

Thanks for adding some context. The "max" or 25 year view on that chart provides some perspective. Still unusual that there's been a recent decrease, but almost every measure of the economy has seen some really weird values in the past 2 years.

I think a chart of the job titles of the dead / disabled from COVID with numbers would be incredibly useful.

My niche has shot through the roof for demand salary and remote with no sign of turning back.

My only macro explanation is 20% left the gig totally.

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

#673

Post by hasperdi »

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.

This is nostalgia, you're remembering things as better than they were. Back then there were so many bad UI in software http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/shame.htm

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

#675

Post by mike_hearn »

hnick wrote: post #516
mike_hearn wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can have both. GUIs were a breakthrough because they enabled much better discoverability, allowed images in the UI and so on. But they were also designed to be fully keyboardable and low latency. Web tech broke all that: - UI was/still is very high latency. Keystrokes input whilst the browser is waiting do not buffer, unlike in classical mainframe/terminal designs. They're just lost or worse might randomly interr…

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…

Yes, "updating all clients in one place" is what I meant by distribution. Windows distribution suffered for many years from problems like:

- Very high latency

- No support for online updates

- Impossible to easily administer

Cross platform was much less of a big deal when web apps started to get big. Windows just dominated in that time. Not many people cared about macOS Classic back then and desktop UNIX didn't matter at all. Browsers were nonetheless way easier to deal with than Windows itself.

Agree that killing piracy was a really big part of it. Of course, you can implement core logic and shared databases with non-web apps too, and the web has a semi-equivalent problem in the form of ad blockers.

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

#676

Post by deafpolygon »

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…

> for company to monetize

I suspect an overwhelming majority of use cases is for this reason alone.

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

#677

Post by deafpolygon »

beambot wrote: post #651
TeMPOraL wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This is what MS Access was developed for.

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

#678

Post by selimthegrim »

WalterBright wrote: post #664
komali2 wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... govern…

First, what does "massive growth in government" even mean? 1. the amount of money it spends 2. the amount of interference in the workings of the marketplace, usually called "unfunded mandates" where they put burdens on businesses > I feel like you're hinting at some kind of alternative that I can't possibly guess at. A much more limited government.

Caltech basically ran on government money so you can thank them for your entire undergraduate education (yes I know you paid tuition but it was no doubt minimal)
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