Covid (Long Covid) and getting poorer relatively over time will all factor in.
U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
741–750 of 751 posts
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#742The common wisdom is more workers are "acting their wage".
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#743I'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 agree to a large extent with your comment. The "office" structure has changed a lot. Secretaries ran the show, and pretty much hand-held everyone in the office and kept the ship pointed in the right direction. Law firms and political offices still have this "outdated" model because if it ain't broken, don't fix it.
Now, your company pays insane amounts of $ for software, systems, and data! You have to do your job, schedule your meetings, keep up with the ungodly amount of email, instant message, SLACK, enter the data in your CRM, talk on the phone, schedule the video meetings, etc. while also keeping track of your personal phone because your partner called or the school called and your dog is sick. There's just so much distraction now by not having "office hours" and having our whole lives in our pockets and constant reach that I think productivity has to go down. It's impossible to focus on anything for any amount of time anymore with how accessible we are expected to be.
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#744Earlier 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.
Nowadays with team shared storage like Box, Dropbox, One Drive etc, it's "HEY EVERYONE ELSE CLOSE Project_Costs_and_Totals_11.22(15).xlsx I NEED TO ADD LAST WEEKS DATA"
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#745Quoting a quote "The only way a business is successful and productive is if employees feel that sense of empowerment, that sense of energy and connection for the company’s mission and are doing meaningful work"
So companies are giving the intrinsic motivation spiel. Fine. Who doesn't want to gaze at the majesty of creation from the peak of the Maslow pyramid/hierarchy?
Yet this year has shown that at the first sign of trouble, even with billions parked in the bank, shareholders and not employees come first. Or if you are a startup then leadership mismanagement and bad decisions are absolved with layoffs (and some tiers). That bottom unsexy part of the Maslow pyramid where basic needs exist are looking very shaky. Hats off to you if you can keep the company and vision your number 1 goal at the looming expense of your family's well-being!
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#746Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you see as the way out of this mess?
Hmm. There are many layers of problems in the healthcare system, EHRs with bad design only one. I will say that small, private clinics who only accept private insurance don't necessarily need to use a federally certified EHR. They are legally allowed to build their own system. One example is OneMedical. When you ask the doctors/PAs/nurses at OneMedical about their EHR, they actually love it. I think the first step wo…
Do you think this is feasible and could happen within the next decade given moderate effort?
I considered targeting standardization in health tech for a while and uncovered a similar layer of red tape as you describe. We can't continue to let our medical system continue to lag behind the rest of the world's and good EHRs are a part of that.
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#747Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Yes, there were plenty of bad UI's and they got called out on sites like that because of it. If you read some of those "bloopers" you realize that the functionality the guy is complaining about are pretty much the default broken behavior these days. For example: applications that don't honor system colors.
With some OS's you can't even have fine grained control over those defaults anymore. Dark modes have brought some of it back, so its better now than 5 years ago, but still worse than 20 years ago. But people pretend that having a dark/light switch is the same thing as being able to customize the color of just about every layer of the UI and have the vast majority of the applications honor it.
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#748Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The degree of bullshit paperwork every white-collar worker has to deal with nowadays is a direct consequence of computers making it possible to make us do that work, and for the recipients to process it. These are bold claims backed up by little to no data other than your anecdotal observations. Productivity has generally been on a steady upward trend in the US since it was first measured in 1947. My own profession…
> Ever seen Mad Men? There was literally a full floor full of human beings typing out bullshit letters on typewriters because computers didn't exist in the era. That's my point: those people received salaries for typing out those letters, making the cost of it clearly visible to the business.
So your point is "we visibly saw the cost before, but no longer see the cost now with tech. Therefore we can conclude that the invisible cost now outweighs the visible cost...because ummmm it's not longer visible?"
Explain that one to me.
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#749I'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 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…
No post body was provided.
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#750Earlier quoted context omitted.
I dont see the problem with this. What is "Gum workflow" in this context ?
Neither do I. It was supposed to be read: A [ncurses or gum] workflow. Gum being an alternative method of making a Bash UI. https://github.com/charmbracelet/gum
Thanks, thats a neat tool!