Ask HN: Were we more productive 10, 15, or 20 years ago?

No doubt about it!

The ability to communicate with anyone around the world within seconds surely helped in getting things done. I don’t know if it created even more tasks, but I would rather have this ability than not.

What do you mean by "task"? It has never been easier (and cheaper) to write fault-tolerant software and deploy it on a global scale to thousands or millions of users.

Or do you mean things like shopping and cleaning?

Having dabbled in web development for 15+ years, I feel like there can be a lot of pain involved in getting a dev environment set up and configured correctly for a project these days. But to me it is worth it: the resulting workflow becomes as simple as it used to be in the old days, except there is now much more power and flexibility available to me as I work. I sure hate debugging some BS related to a nested dependency in some random package, but I like having my code linted and compiled to ES5 meaning I can use modern conveniences without too much panic on the cross-browser front. I think over all I'm a lot more productive with the new tools.

No, absolutely not. It’s myopic to even entertain the possibility. At least in web dev, which I have experienced.

For some reason people still love to criticize browsers, even though they have improved dramatically. Around 2000, every UI required two or three versions. Once you got it done in Firefox, you would start on the IE version, which would take almost as much time as the first implementation. Then, you’d repeat the process for each point release of IE.

On the server, rails was the big revolution. The big achievement of DHH wasn’t so much techical as social: here, you had an extremely well-curated set of best practices, smuggled into your project under the guise of a framework. Before, you’d join a team and find the database password was in a switch block three levels deep in config/real/colors.inc.php3.~bac.php. Suddenly, you could join any team and know your way around the codebase on the second day.

Many other things that used to be major work items have become trivially easy. It would routinely take me a day or so just to get somewhat recent versions of Apache, php, and MySQL (and all their libraries) to compile on a new server. You’d encounter all sorts of difficult-to-debug networking problems when moving to production. There were certain tasks that seem like they should be trivial, but were actually terribly difficult to pull off in the web stack, such as chats.