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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

#711

Post by gausswho »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #50

This is what happens when you measure GDP using services. The tail wags the dog with demand Being the tail. I suspect you see different results if you looked at physical Goods.

'Productive' is such manipulation is this usage. In the modern economy, products shipped per employee often has little relation to how hard an employee works. Does not this metric speak poorly upon leadership's decision-making, the increase of onerous busywork and surveillance, and a dislocated world economy?

If you believe Zuckerberg chasing the Metaverse has misallocated resources, his company has shipped less 'product' per employee. Does that really mean employees have been less 'productive'?

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

#712

Post by JoBrad »

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 think you’re onto something with this. SAP power users can input data at blazing speeds, because they remember so many of the codes. So this definitely isn’t just a GUI vs TUI paradigm.

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

#713

Post by P_I_Staker »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #709
P_I_Staker wrote: post #705

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could provide a terminal UI from within the GUI (it's not unheard of and can work quite well)

Alas, most modern software doesn't come with the option of a GUI. It's a HTML document pressed into service as a GUI with a greater or lesser degree of success.

I see. Well... piss.

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

#714

Post by VBprogrammer »

P_I_Staker wrote: post #713
VBprogrammer wrote: post #709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alas, most modern software doesn't come with the option of a GUI. It's a HTML document pressed into service as a GUI with a greater or lesser degree of success.

I see. Well... piss.

Lol!

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

#715

Post by TchoBeer »

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…

When I was in Israel almost every fast-food resturant had a kiosk like that, and they were all super easy to use and responsive. This might partially be an implementation problem.

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

#716

Post by ec109685 »

ec109685 wrote: post #624
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…

That article was awful with just guesses left and right on causes, without even measuring how the number is calculated.

*mentioning rather.

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

#718

Post by r00fus »

dfxm12 wrote: post #397
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…

It's just the corporation friendly mass media trying to combat calls for better worker treatment/compensation. This is just the next single from the album that brought us "quiet quitting", "the great resignation", "millennials are lazy", etc. It's important for the backers of these media outlets to float these stories out there, lest anyone become sympathetic to workers in light of the facts that minimum wage hasn't…

Just remember who owns the WaPo and it makes a lot more sense.

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

#719

Post by quadrifoliate »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #682
quadrifoliate wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 indi…

RSV is overwhelming some hospitals: https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/ydhvbs/how_are_my... Although, the whole hospital volume thing is now wrapped up in pay shortages and rationing of healthcare, so do not really know how much the spread of virus is contributing and how much the lack of resources being put towards healthcare, and specifically pediatric healthcare is contributing. > Seems like it would be pr…

> I am not willing to pay the price of my kids’ development.

I mean, sooner or later the people working in schools are going to be fed up with parents' constant refrain of "The whole world needs to sacrifice their health so I don't have to keep my kids at home for an extra week."

Somewhat similar to the healthcare workers' issues you mention in your comment.

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

#720

Post by ficklepickle »

StillBored wrote: post #334
mschuster91 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Its not always just about tabindex. For example it might be about understanding that there are multiple ways to fill out a form that makes sense. Then hiding/showing pieces as needed and/or providing hotkeys to jump from field 1 to field 5 because the user doesn't want to fill out 2,3,4 because they are optional. Its about keystroke optimization. Sure they can press tab 3 times, or they can just press ctrl-5 (or what…

I think it depends a lot on how it is used. In the case of sabre, that is somebody's job. They use that interface everyday so the user needs to be able to use the interface efficiently and is willing to learn the shortcuts.

A sign up form that a given user will only use once in their lifetime is another matter. It needs to be simple lest the user abandons the process. Most users in that case are not willing to learn keyboard shortcuts, tabbing over optional fields probably makes more sense here.

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