[HN Gopher] U.S. workers have gotten less productive - no one is...
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U.S. workers have gotten less productive - no one is sure why
Author : pseudolus
Score : 178 points
Date : 2022-10-31 13:26 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.washingtonpost.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.washingtonpost.com)
| highwaylights wrote:
| Just came into the thread for the comments and am not
| disappointed.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| The lowering of standards, shortages, expensive fuel, food
| inflation are all reminiscent of Communism. People don't feel
| like working for a system when it seems to be failing them. A
| million dollars for a new home, when the lower bracket still
| makes under 50k, and get raises in cents. Just kind of kills
| incentive to work hard, when even if you do starve and penny
| pinch your way into some savings, inflation will eat it away
| anyway.
| kbelder wrote:
| Thanks, that is interesting, and you've given me something to
| chew on for a while. The similarities are there, and the causes
| are plausible.
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| "Communism is when capitalism". What you're describing are
| literally failures of capitalism.
| ravenstine wrote:
| There's a strong motive to deny that people operate on
| incentive. If people are incentivized by profit and attaining
| greater things, the idea that wealth distribution _doesn 't_
| disincentivize workers completely collapses.
|
| Numerically, I make substantially more than I did 5 years ago.
| In terms of relative value, while I do have a fancier title, I
| barely make more than I did when my job was easier. If someone
| were to ask me "what are you career goals", I'd struggle to
| tell them any at this point because I have little reason to do
| more than what I already do. What, I'm supposed to want to take
| on more responsibilities only to find the economy adjust itself
| so my lifestyle barely changes? I know some people have a
| frankly ridiculous form of workaholism that allows them to
| persevere, but I see them as the horse from Animal Farm.
| Eventually they will lose the energy to do what they do
| effectively and the system is not going to support them in
| proportion for their loyalty, to say the least.
| rvba wrote:
| Manufacturing productivity has dropped due to broken supply
| chains, in fact manufactuers of sub-components have own issues
| with missing components and so on.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| 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.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| There is rising incompetence everywhere.
| otikik wrote:
| The "quiet quitting" strategy was not well accepted and now they
| are trying this.
|
| > Since the pandemic started, "the link between hard work and
| reward has been broken"
|
| More like "since the 1970s"
| mcguire wrote:
| https://www.bls.gov/productivity/graphics/2022/graphic-4.htm
|
| "Real compensation" is "Employer costs for wages, salaries, and
| employee benefits", adjusted for inflation.
| subsubzero wrote:
| I have a hunch, The past 10-15 years has seen a large slew of
| mergers in all industries, (tech, telecoms, pharma, food,
| grocery, etc) that have created shared monopolies in most sectors
| of the economy. Given that news, monopolies function is not to
| deliver productivity for productivity's sake, but to extract
| profits from inside that sector. Most of these companies are
| sprawling behemoths where managers are encouraged to grow
| headcount(as it makes them look more important) while still
| keeping the profit machines flowing. I'm not the least bit
| surprised as if we had a country where smaller players were
| duking it out in their respective sectors, you would get faster
| innovation.
|
| Bottom line, more competition is good for end customers, and good
| for productivity as well.
| eat wrote:
| The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy. It's that I just don't
| care.
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure I know why...
|
| The working environment changed. Bit by bit I moved from an
| environment with gentleman's agreements and so on towards
| something in which everything was codified, safetyism became
| rampant, etc.
|
| In the UK over the past few years I went from going into a nice
| office in a number of beautiful old buildings, getting my stuff
| done with cameraderie, having lunch together and playing board
| games, having a laugh in the board room, perhaps a pub visit
| after work - to sitting alone at home for 8 hours staring at a
| screen.
|
| So I quit. My productivity - gone. And I fear it's never coming
| back unless that environment comes back; because I can't
| effectively function at a "job" with zero human interaction for
| an entire day, I've had to replace traditional work with other
| activities.
|
| But is it just me? My friends in retail and other low skill jobs
| - half the workforce seems to have disappeared so they're all
| being asked to do far more than is realistically possible. My
| friends who are in education - the entire job changed, no more
| giggling and laughing children, you were playing a video game
| with half the class absent. Perhaps they're back now - but
| they're dysfunctional because their development was neglected for
| years. My friends who are in law - the entire job changed, no
| more travel, no dressing up, sit at home with a screen. My
| friends who are in medicine - christ, let's not even go there,
| eh?
|
| I can't speak for those people. But I know that I need a reset,
| because this "new world" is one I'm just not built for.
| swalsh wrote:
| I've been working from home since about 2017. I kind of echo
| this. In the beginning it was nice, I had a HUGE productivity
| boost. After a while I became disconnected from everything. The
| other day I realized the only adult I talk to reguarly in
| person is my wife. Somtimes on weekends I talk to a store
| clerk. Zoom meetings don't fill that missing spot, it's just
| work, and I have very little personal connection with any of my
| coworkers... Days and weeks and months seem to merge.
|
| I'm an introverted person, I like solitude. But I guess all
| things in balance, it would be nice to talk to another adult
| once in a while about something that's not work.
|
| I got really into Crypto, because Crypto seems to have a heavy
| focus on community. It was fun to fly to NY and talk to others
| in the community. But then I flew home, and the spot was
| missing again.
| duderific wrote:
| I don't consider myself particularly outgoing, but I'm glad to
| be back in the office 4 days a week. I really enjoy
| collaborating in person over a laptop or whiteboard, and
| shooting the breeze with my colleagues.
|
| That said, I don't have an overly long commute, so I totally
| get it for those that are able to be more productive due to not
| spending hours in the car every day.
|
| I notice that when I'm working from home, I'm much more likely
| to goof off and be less focused. Plus my wife being there is
| always distracting me with one thing or another. I'm pretty
| sure I'm quite a bit less productive working from home.
| robocat wrote:
| > Plus my wife being there is always distracting me with one
| thing or another.
|
| More generically: young kids require attention, then we grow
| up and most adults desire attention but only get a little.
|
| Even very high status individuals often seek attention (Elon
| & sinks?). I wonder how much of our status economy is about
| getting attention?
|
| Giving great attention can be quite the aphrodisiac.
| jimlongton wrote:
| > towards something in which everything was codified, safetyism
| became rampant
|
| Those "gentleman's agreements" were not that great if you
| happened to be a woman, gay or any other minority. The upsides
| to HR, employment regulation and so on has been making the
| office a far better place to work for a lot of people.
|
| While I agree that there are rampant problems in a lot of
| sectors, from low skilled to medical, there have been some
| wins. My team went fully remote for 2 years and now most people
| still work 3 days a week from home. We were able to build up a
| large and talented team during the lockdowns with most of my
| co-workers and those I manage 3 timezones away. We adopted more
| flexible working hours and we've never been happier. My manager
| can take time in the morning to get his kids to creche and I
| can take a longer lunch to check in on elderly relatives. I no
| longer spend 2 hours a day stuck in traffic. Our productivity
| has skyrocketed. We may be privileged tech workers, but the
| change in work styles has definitely boosted our company as a
| whole.
| jbm wrote:
| thot_experiment wrote:
| I feel like this is a very real concern? In general I'm in
| favor of playing fast and loose with rules, and don't put a
| lot of stock into codifying anything because I feel like
| it's overall a huge negative when you're trying to get
| things done.
|
| That all being said this particular arena is one that's so
| fraught with tiny little edges that all stack up to benefit
| certain classes of people unequally it unfortunately feels
| necessary to be explicit and precise. Ultimately this power
| is a zero sum game, and for and a more equal world means we
| must take power from some people and give it to others.
| That's almost never a thing that happens voluntarily, even
| if the will is there. It's very easy to argue for a status
| quo that benefits you, especially if the advantages you
| gain are easy to lie to yourself about.
|
| "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when
| his salary depends on his not understanding it." -- Upton
| Sinclair
| [deleted]
| xab33 wrote:
| I totally agree. Where I work, in-person work became optional.
| Strangely, everyone 35 or younger decided to work from home
| (most of them don't have kids, which would be the one decent
| excuse), but the older people mostly come in. At 34, I'm sort
| of in-between, but enjoyed bantering with people my age or
| younger.
|
| So I get the worst of both worlds: my boss can still come in my
| office at any random time and bug me about whatever, but not
| the social life or the ability to bounce ideas off each other
| when designing a new system. All-online communication simply
| does not work for creative or complex tasks.
|
| The youngsters get practically nothing done -- I worked with
| them for several years before the pandemic, so I know for a
| fact that their productivity specifically went down 90% -- and
| guess who gets to pick up the slack? It turns out that even
| relatively motivated PhD students actually need in-person
| accountability and direction, or they just spin their wheels at
| best, or goof off at worst. No matter what excuses they make,
| it's not good for them in the long run, since it will be
| reflected in their CV. I'm not against fun, even during work
| hours, but you have to get the job done.
|
| It's a medical research institution with a small clinic, so
| there are, as you suggest, additional issues there. I think
| science, in particular, _requires_ in-depth, in-person
| conversations and that is where most of the really good ideas
| come from.
| sinecure wrote:
| This has been my experience as well at 32. The commercial
| real estate firm I work at has a 4 days in the office policy,
| so we have a fairly robust social atmosphere. You can't
| design a building on a webinar, you need to sit together in a
| conference room, roll the blueprints out on the table and
| point to things, sketch changes, review pro formas.. it can't
| be replaced digitally.
|
| The young people we're getting are like they're from another
| planet. They think it's' fine to come in late and leave early
| every day, they only do the bare minimum of work assigned and
| show zero engagement to help the firm beyond the scope of
| their assigned tasks. They're all coming from colleges that
| were remote or jobs that were work from home. How can you
| learn as a young professional in a work from home setting?
| You need to sit in on meetings, phone calls and discussions,
| you need to absorb the whole office around you, not just
| sitting alone at your computer.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| >It turns out that even relatively motivated PhD students
| actually need in-person accountability and direction, or they
| just spin their wheels at best, or goof off at worst.
|
| You don't have the data to shows that in-person is necessary.
| And there are plenty of remote-only companies that make it
| work. It sounds like you've decided that there can only be
| one possible solution and then given up. That kind of
| thinking might explain a whole lot about the situation.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Exact same boat dude. I miss the before-fore times a lot and
| still cannot believe how we got to this position.
|
| Still trying to figure out whats next for me. This WFH shit is
| gonna stick around in our industry for a while... and it just
| isn't compatible with how I function. I have no clue what to do
| next.
| coldpie wrote:
| > But is it just me?
|
| No. I go into the office every day because I feel the same. I
| need to get out of the house and see people. (It is OK if you,
| reader, do not feel this way! People are different!) There's a
| handful of other folks who come in every day. I'm starting up a
| project this week to revive our office culture a bit, to try to
| spring back from the COVID devastation.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| I think a lot of us work-from-home preferrers also like
| (good) offices better than WFH, just not to the tune of
| hundreds of dollars and tens of hours lost per month.
| coldpie wrote:
| Bus pass here costs $90/mo and I get to spend ~80 minutes
| per day reading books. My office is across the street from
| the library, it's pretty great :) It's no accident my house
| is next to a bus line, that was a major factor when we were
| buying.
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| Hello fellow space traveler.
|
| I appreciate your message. Good luck.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| People going back to the office with 2 hours of commuting won't
| be more productive than people who work from home.
| ep103 wrote:
| > In the first half of 2022, productivity -- the measure of how
| much output in goods and services an employee can produce in an
| hour -- plunged by the sharpest rate on record going back to
| 1947, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
|
| > The productivity plunge is perplexing, because productivity
| took off to levels not seen in decades when the coronavirus
| pandemic forced an overnight switch to remote work
|
| It also comes at a time when many employers are shifting back to
| hybrid schedules and RTO, despite employee claims that remote
| work allowed flexibility helped them work more efficiently
|
| .
|
| What a mystery.
| dahfizz wrote:
| If this is true, why was productivity so high pre-pandemic when
| everyone was in an office?
| cma wrote:
| What everyone is ignoring is that financial speculation leaks
| into productivity numbers, and we went into a speculative
| boom during covid and have been in a speculative bust during
| this recent period.
| dml2135 wrote:
| This article and the chart within it reference the rate of
| change in productivity, but not the raw productivity number.
|
| Without seeing those numbers, my assumption -- and what seems
| to be implied here -- is that productivity rose in early 2020
| with remote work, and it is now dropping to pre-pandemic
| levels.
| vlozko wrote:
| I'm of the opinion that WFH has been a net negative to
| productivity. Measuring productivity was much easier for
| managers to do when everyone was in the office as employees
| would find it more difficult to hide attempts at slacking off.
| Those who are less productive when WFH are less willing to
| admit it and I believe it's the reason why whenever the topic
| of WFH comes up, it's drowned by the voices of all those who
| say it's been absolutely great for them.
|
| I don't think anyone is going to argue about the conveniences
| this WFH culture has brought. And I'm certain there quite a
| number of people who can prove how much better their work has
| been because of this shift. Those who are being far less
| productive, though, are kinda ruining it for the rest of us and
| lots of managers know it. I think Satya is on point when he
| talked about what employers say about productivity and what
| their managers think is actually happening.
| notfromhere wrote:
| Measuring productivity is hard in and out of the office.
|
| From personal experience, it was incredibly easy to do
| nothing when working from the office while remote you're more
| held to your deliverables. In an office, it's very common to
| see people look busy, but are just doing unrelated things.
|
| The only difference is that in an office people mask their
| lack of productivity by pretending to be busy, whereas remote
| you don't have to do that.
| refurb wrote:
| My guess is Covid. I don't know about anyone else but I was so
| burned out focusing on work isn't a priority.
|
| It's going to take a year or more before people feel like they've
| recovered.
| lambdaba wrote:
| I feel like what we're hearing about excess mortality etc. is
| also related. The pandemic has been exhausting for so many
| people, and the multiple sources of uncertainty that have
| popped up in its wake have made things even worse.
|
| I do hope we find a way to recover.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| my 2c is nihilism and cynicism are why.
|
| _Why bother, nothing means anything anyways?_ _Why bother
| chasing the dream, if it doesn 't come true?_
|
| People have increasingly been losing meaning and purpose in their
| lives. Old dreams like home ownership, family (including
| extended), close knit friendships, and eventual financial
| freedom/security have been supplanted by travel (broken by
| inflation & lockdowns, made fake by social media), fur babies
| (due to gender disparagement and estrangement), workplace
| politics / friends for a season (as we move for work, and have
| increasingly tighter requirements for friend groups due to
| technology (ie you can find people who agree with you online, so
| no need to befriend the neighbor with slightly annoying political
| beliefs), and life time of debt and little investment value[1].
|
| So people are simply burned out being asked to pursue a long run
| strategy w/ a "promised" dream. The people delivered on their end
| of the bargain, but the dream makers didnt.
|
| [1]: https://www.macrotrends.net/2324/sp-500-historical-chart-
| dat... From late 1999 to 2016 returns on .inx after inflation
| have been down or flat. People no longer believe the "Buy the
| index and you will see profits" after 20 years of contrary
| evidence. Over the past 30 yrs the index using the "8% per year"
| usual claim, should have returned 10x but it actually only
| returned 1/2 that.
|
| Why try, it's not going to work anyways?
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| We should blame it on return to the office.
| eppp wrote:
| My productivity has decreased simply because of delays and
| shortages. I can't get things when I need them or sometimes at
| all. Everything takes so much longer when you can't plan for
| anything.
| mesozoic wrote:
| RTO
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Perhaps it has to do with the fact that businesses run on
| skeleton crews these days, and stretching a low number of
| employees thin decreases their productivity. I'm sure that
| employees say the same thing if they were directly asked.
|
| That and being forced back into offices after working remotely
| for 2 years.
| umvi wrote:
| If you directly asked me I would probably say: "Well, working
| from home the temptation to watch YouTube and stuff on my
| second monitor is much higher and sometimes I find I've wasted
| a lot of time procrastinating my tasks because there are
| essentially no consequences for doing so"
| droptablemain wrote:
| Well, what has being more productive gotten them?
| Xcelerate wrote:
| That plot in the article showing "percent change in labor output"
| looks like pure noise to me. Are they sure that's measuring what
| they think it is?
| atkailash wrote:
| gitfan86 wrote:
| The best way to understand this is to compare Tesla's R&D
| expenses to Twitter's R&D expenses. If you got into the details
| you would see MANY MANY meetings at Twitter with literally
| nothing was accomplished.
| rajeshp1986 wrote:
| It is surprising how no one is talking about the productivity
| loss due to social media & entertainment. I feel most people now
| spend a considerable amount of time on social media,
| entertainment on both personal & work time. I am not saying
| companies should impose restrictions on employees but we are
| living in a generation of 24x7 entertainment. We are definitely
| less creative and productive compared to workers 20 years ago.
| shams93 wrote:
| react
| rglover wrote:
| "Rushing makes messes." - Robert C. Martin
| cosmiccatnap wrote:
| This reminds me of a study where purses would be dropped with <
| 20 usd equivalent in them at random places around the world and
| the sociologists, psychologists and economists couldn't
| understand why most of them were returned given their
| understanding of human nature and the answer that they didn't
| want to accept was that their understanding was wrong.
|
| People don't work harder because their work is unfulfilling,
| their pay is underwhelming, and their hours are exhausting.
| Inflation just went through the roof and half of all price
| increases in domestic product are directly corperate profits and
| even the most uneducated among us are aware that every single
| part of this system is rigged.
|
| and the Washington post claims "no one is sure why" but in
| reality they mean "nobody in a position of privilege that we
| would hire or talk to has an excuse that doesn't point out the
| obvious things we can't say about class struggle and income
| inequality"
| bdw5204 wrote:
| I think there's a very obvious reason for the "productivity
| drop": Return to Office
|
| I remember tons of studies showing that remote work had caused
| unprecedented increases in productivity so it seems plausible to
| me that companies ending it caused the productivity drop which
| caused the minor recession earlier this year (the big one due to
| the Fed's rate hikes is, I believe, still in the future). The
| article itself even acknowledges that remote work increased
| productivity yet ignores the 50 foot tall elephant in the room
| that is RTO.
| SauciestGNU wrote:
| Yeah no kidding. If it were demanded of me to RTO after this
| time of working remote, they wouldn't get quiet quitting,
| they'd get active sabotage while I search for a new job.
| There's no excuse for torturing ICs with RTO for reasons of
| executive vanity.
| rtp4me wrote:
| Wait, are you saying you would actively sabotage your place
| of employment because they asked you to work in the office?
| Did you have the same feeling before WFH was even a thing?
|
| Edit: Also, what does "torturing ICs with RTO for reasons of
| executive vanity" even mean? Have we come so far that working
| from an office is now "torture"? If so, the level of
| privilege is simply astounding...
| Kiro wrote:
| It's because RTO hasn't actually happened yet. Most companies
| either keep WFH or go with a hybrid solution. My theory is that
| the productivity boost wore off as soon as WFH became the new
| normal, and went negative due to obvious reasons (easier to
| slack off). Classic honeymoon phenomenon where everyone was
| ecstatic to work from home initially but got used to it and now
| take it for granted.
| lkrubner wrote:
| The BLS recently reported that at its peak, only 7% of
| Americans were working from home, so this demographic is
| probably too small to have much large scale impact on the
| productivity numbers. If there is stagnation in the
| productivity numbers, we should look at what the other 93% of
| workers are doing.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| According to this it was 35% at the peak, and 7% is the
| current figure: https://www.nbcnews.com/data-graphics/data-
| remote-workers-de...
| svnt wrote:
| How did they conduct the measure? 7% is nowhere near what the
| real estate picture says.
| taeric wrote:
| I agree it is almost certainly related. In that a lot of the
| reporting on rise of productivity that came at the beginning
| was just as explainable by noise as the current drop is.
|
| That is, I can't rule this out. But I would also not bet
| against reversion to the mean. Such that the actual waterline
| on productivity is probably not known, just yet.
| [deleted]
| switch007 wrote:
| And yet my company likes to remind people on a daily basis that
| it's a privilege to be allowed to work from the offices
| (because they just refurbished them). Literally their wording.
| Completely detached from reality
| d_sem wrote:
| The article focuses on the drop of productivity measured in 2022.
| Personally 2022 was the first out of 2 years I could take a
| meaningful vacation. Perhaps the reduction of restrictions
| allowed people to improve their work-life balance in favor of
| more "life".
| downrightmike wrote:
| $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
| bell-cot wrote:
| Quippy Answer: Bloat-tastic manager/worker ratios, plus meetings
| and other busywork.
| logicalmonster wrote:
| The reason for anything large and complicated is very nuanced and
| probably has a lot of small causes that we might all disagree on,
| but I'd say that the overarching reason for this social malaise
| might be that a lot of people are feeling a lack of hope for
| their future.
|
| If you think you're working towards something good: a family,
| home ownership, kids, a reasonable amount of life enjoyment in
| terms of leisure, a stable society, and a pleasant retirement
| where you can enjoy seeing your grandkids and participate in some
| hobbies for a decade or so before your mind or body
| collapse....you might be willing to push yourself to achieve as
| much as you possibly can, even if you're a lowly cashier or
| janitor.
|
| But who wants to go the extra mile for this degenerate and
| hopeless society where your money is being destroyed and you have
| grave concerns about many things? Whether rightly or wrongly,
| everybody is seeing fucked up things in the world and many people
| are feeling much greater concern about the future than we've ever
| seen before. This isn't a recipe for going the extra mile at work
| or harnessing the energy of society to achieve something great.
| coinbasetwwa wrote:
| You're 100% right. That plus the fact that my employer tried to
| fire me for not taking an injection, I'm good on chilling.
| lkrubner wrote:
| 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 problems and
| they keep underestimating the flexibility of the old models. For
| instance, most large companies used to be run by armies of
| secretaries, and the senior secretaries functioned as what we
| would now call "project managers" -- they made calendars, oversaw
| who was working on what, followed up to keep track on whether
| work was being done, and kept a close eye on what money was being
| spent. The crucial thing about having humans overseeing such work
| is that humans can take a flexible approach to the rules: they
| know when to break them. By contrast, systems that are highly
| dependent on software tend to be more rigid. Software doesn't
| know when its rules should be broken.
|
| The flexibility of the old system is constantly underestimated,
| the rigidness of the new systems is often misunderstood.
|
| In his book "The Design Of Design" Fred Brooks talks about the
| power of trust, and he contrasts that situations where everything
| needs to be first negotiated and specified in a contract. High
| trust systems are flexible and fast, whereas a system where every
| detail needs to be specified in a contract is slow and rigid. We
| should stop and ask ourselves, our favorite Agile methodology
| resembles which of these? Are specifying things with needless
| detail?
| conductr wrote:
| 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 liaison for the software evaluation. This
| is when I formed my "never replace a terminal based app, with a
| GUI based app and expect productivity gains" theory. Everyone
| working in the hospital knew the terminal app, they type in
| some random 3 letter code and a screen would pop up. Then they
| would memorize how many tabs each field was apart from each
| other. Without a mouse, people could just hum along imputing
| data a blazing speed once some muscle memory was in place.
| Everyone had little cheat sheets printed out for the less
| frequently used commands/codes. When you replace this with a
| browser/desktop GUI with selectors and drop downs and reactive
| components of GUI, it tends to 1) require mouse usage for most
| people and 2) lose the ability to do this quick data entry I
| described. The pretty interface becomes a steady stream of
| speed bumps that reduce productivity. Since then I've witnessed
| it in banking and other industries too.
| ip26 wrote:
| _I don't think productivity was ever the goal of this
| software. It was to have a record that is standard, digital,
| transferable, etc._
|
| Going a little further, this was appealing in part to avoid
| simple medical errors & oversights. Losing the record, mixing
| up records, incomplete history, and so on. Eliminating
| medical error is incredibly valuable but doesn't show up as
| "productivity".
| sokoloff wrote:
| This is amusing as, 10 years ago, my wife (a decade-plus
| under 60, even now) showed up to a consultation with a
| doctor who remarked that she looked very good for someone
| over 60 and who suffered from a series of conditions that
| she did not have but showed up in "her" medical records.
| conductr wrote:
| My wife is in 30s but has had a lot of women's health
| stuff going on the last decade. We stay completely within
| the same "healthcare network" of hospitals precisely
| because they actually use the same system and all doctors
| can access it (obviously we like the providers as well!)
| But even for basic procedures we could save a little on
| like lab work or imaging by going out of this network
| we've learned it doesn't really work as promised. It's
| still hard to get your records to stay together unless
| they're in the same company's database is what we've
| learned.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Yes. All the systems are set up this way.
|
| The problem is: how do you allow departments to retain
| their fiefdoms in a world of centralised data? The answer
| is to spend a fortune on management consulting.
| yurishimo wrote:
| Or nationalize the documentation infrastructure. This is
| not a problem in the developed world. i give my doctor my
| tax ID and they can see my entire patient history, all of
| my medication, and relevant notes from other providers.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| We do the same. My wife sees tons of suboptimal
| healthcare delivery due to lack of doctors having the
| necessary information. In our current area, it is easy to
| find doctors they use mychart and interface with local
| hospital, so if we were to end up in the hospital, our
| medical history is immediately available.
| RajT88 wrote:
| I used to work in Healthcare software (Not Epic).
|
| Productivity is indeed a selling point.
|
| I will also tell you that EHR software is universally hated
| by doctors. Does not matter who makes it. The company that
| cracks that will make billions.
|
| One interesting idea was a voice assistant wired up to take
| inputs as doctors did their work. I don't think it went
| anywhere (yet).
| darkmarmot wrote:
| I work in it too. And the US govt is not approving or even
| looking to approve new EHRs. The bureaucratic hurdles (and
| regulatory capture) are such that it is no longer feasible
| in this country. I would write one in a heartbeat if it
| wasn't a doomed venture.
| drited wrote:
| Sounds like Bloomberg.
| peteradio wrote:
| Mouse moves are crack for ml algorithms if the interface is
| maintained somehow.
| Underqualified wrote:
| The GUI apps have the benefit of being easier for onboarding.
| We've redesigned the workplace to deal with constant employee
| turnover.
|
| I guess they also make more sense to management since it
| looks like something they could do themselves, or at least
| understand.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| 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 interrupt your current transaction.
|
| - HTML has no concept of keyboard shortcuts, accelerator
| keys, menus, context menus, command lines and other power
| user features that allow regular users to go fast.
|
| We adopted web tech even for productivity/crud apps,
| because browsers solved distribution at a time when
| Microsoft was badly dropping the ball on it. That solved
| problems for developers and allowed more rapid iteration,
| but ended up yielding lower productivity than older
| generations of apps for people who became highly skilled.
| tomcam wrote:
| > HTML has no concept of keyboard shortcuts, accelerator
| keys, menus, context menus, command lines and other power
| user features that allow regular users to go fast.
|
| HTML has had a limited concept of accelerator keys for
| years, but it's not pretty:
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/HTML/Global_att...
| tremon wrote:
| This is a good observation. Constant employee turnover also
| reduces worker productivity, as it means most current
| employees are juniors in their role (regardless of what
| their title says).
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Problem is the GUI _could_ have shortcuts for everything,
| but usually won't.
|
| It doesn't help that the evaluators for a new system will
| also approach from the perspective of a new user, even
| though none of them will be a new user in some months.
|
| I've so wanted to create auto-hot-keys for many tasks, but
| end up having to use (x,y) clicks where I get boned every
| design touch-up (deliberate or side-effect of another
| change).
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| > I don't think productivity was ever the goal of this
| software.
|
| Thing to remember finance/economists/rentiers have a
| different definition of efficiency and productivity than you
| do. In this case the productivity has to do with billing not
| the uninteresting things that doctors do. By reducing the
| cost of billing and forcing doctors to document more things
| to be billed more money can be extracted.
| beefield wrote:
| > never replace a terminal based app, with a GUI based app
| and expect productivity gains
|
| I can imagine this being true. It seems that almost the whole
| software industry has failed to grasp the distinction between
| an appliance and a tool. An appliance you expect almost
| anyone to be able to use without training. A tool, well you
| are expected to learn how to use it, and after that, you are
| much more productive than before. And most software seems to
| be moving towards appliance.
| vidanay wrote:
| > 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.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| "Fun" fact: the Therac-25 tragedy was in part caused by this
| type of usage - folks who know it so well they just blast
| through the screens from memory. But the software in question
| wasn't resilient to this use-case, and apparently resulted in
| an inconsistent state.
| gridspy wrote:
| Good example.
|
| ---
|
| The system distinguished between errors that halted the
| machine, requiring a restart, and errors which merely
| paused the machine (which allowed operators to continue
| with the same settings using a keypress). However, some
| errors which endangered the patient merely paused the
| machine, and the frequent occurrence of minor errors caused
| operators to become accustomed to habitually unpausing the
| machine.
|
| One failure occurred when a particular sequence of
| keystrokes was entered on the VT-100 terminal which
| controlled the PDP-11 computer: if the operator were to
| press "X" to (erroneously) select 25 MeV photon mode, then
| use "cursor up" to edit the input to "E" to (correctly)
| select 25 MeV Electron mode, then "Enter", all within eight
| seconds of the first keypress, well within the capability
| of an experienced user of the machine. These edits weren't
| noticed as it would take 8 seconds for startup, so it would
| go with the default setup.[3]
|
| ---
|
| ... which allowed the electron beam to be set for X-ray
| mode without the X-ray target being in place. A second
| fault allowed the electron beam to activate during field-
| light mode, during which no beam scanner was active or
| target was in place.
|
| Previous models had hardware interlocks to prevent such
| faults, but the Therac-25 had removed them, depending
| instead on software checks for safety.
|
| The high-current electron beam struck the patients with
| approximately 100 times the intended dose of radiation, and
| over a narrower area, delivering a potentially lethal dose
| of beta radiation. The feeling was described by patient Ray
| Cox as "an intense electric shock", causing him to scream
| and run out of the treatment room.[4] Several days later,
| radiation burns appeared, and the patients showed the
| symptoms of radiation poisoning; in three cases, the
| injured patients later died as a result of the overdose.[5]
|
| ---
|
| In response to incidents like those associated with
| Therac-25, the IEC 62304 standard was created, which
| introduces development life cycle standards for medical
| device software and specific guidance on using software of
| unknown pedigree.[7]
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
| mbesto wrote:
| > It was to have a record that is standard, digital,
| transferable, etc.
|
| Which translates into productivity. If something is standard,
| digital and transferable it means you can increase the rate
| of output in relation to its input (which is the definition
| of productivity).
| foobiekr wrote:
| You are optimizing the downstream consumers of the records
| not _necessarily_ care, which is what you probably _want_
| to optimize.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Right, but it's the records that are standard, digital and
| transferrable; not the work. So what you end up optimizing
| for is producing paperwork.
| mbesto wrote:
| huh? if the records are "standard, digital and
| transferrable", it means all of the work associated with
| those records is sped up.
|
| - Need to retrieve past doctor visits about a patient?
| person at front desk no longer needs to walk to the
| folder closet, then scan the whole thing to find your
| name and then read through all of the documents to find
| the relevant visits. just click a button.
|
| - How about getting the prescriptions provided to you
| from a previous doctor? Reduction in time to phone / fax
| the previous doctor. just click a button.
|
| - Want to check if your insurance covers your procedure?
| Receptionist calls the carrier, sits on a 6.5 minute
| customer service wait queue, then gets the info versus
| 1-click.
|
| - and, and...
|
| It was always about productivity.
| lanstin wrote:
| It is more productive if the person just knows if the
| procedure is covered because the insurance companies have
| stable standards and trust the medical providers rather
| than having it all be JIT decisions based on rules that
| either constantly shift or are so vague/low trust as to
| be "you medical person yourself can't decide if this
| procedure is covered, you have to call us."
|
| And back in the paper days, the staff would pull up the
| records for the days appointments. ER visits would have
| less data but normal medical care would be fine.
| scarface74 wrote:
| > and trust the medical providers
|
| $68 Billion in medical fraud in the US
|
| > https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6139931/
|
| Part of the opioid crisis caused by basically bribing
| doctors
|
| Yes I'm well aware that when drug abuse was happening in
| the "inner cities" where the government looked the other
| way because it was more concerned with propping up
| countries during the Cold War, the same people who want
| to treat drug addiction like a "disease" when it's
| happening in "rural America", it blamed "single mothers"
| and "lack of morals".
| mbesto wrote:
| > if the person just knows if the procedure is covered
| because the insurance companies have stable standards and
| trust the medical providers rather than having it all be
| JIT decisions based on rules that either constantly shift
| or are so vague/low trust
|
| None those are related to use or lack of use of
| technology. Those are purely bureaucratic rules setup by
| insurance carriers.
|
| > And back in the paper days, the staff would pull up the
| records for the days appointments.
|
| And sometimes those papers would get lost, or maybe
| they're still sitting in the folder on a door because
| someone forget to clean them up, or they were in the
| wrong order so it took the person longer to find the
| person's name, appointments would shift, etc. etc.
|
| I can't believe I'm having to explain to someone the
| productivity advantages of a system of record to a
| technology focused crowd...
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| That will only be a speed-up if the time saved from
| easier information retrieval is smaller than the time
| spent in increased paperwork, which it may or may not be,
| but is an assertion that needs justification.
|
| In general, I'll note producing documentation is fairly
| slow and tedious. It takes something like an order of
| magnitude longer to write a sentence than to read it. So
| this optimization is only going to be a productivity
| boost if this paperwork is accessed repeatedly, dozens of
| times in the course of treatment (the productive thing).
| mbesto wrote:
| > easier information retrieval is smaller than the time
| spent in increased paperwork
|
| What paperwork creation increased as a result of digital
| record use?
|
| I'm beginning to think y'all are conflating the increase
| of documentation with the use of digitalization. The two
| aren't mutually exclusive.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| The problem is that you've optimized time savings for the
| cheapest people for a hospital to employ at the cost of
| time spent by the most expensive people a hospital
| employs, eliminating a handful of cheap jobs while making
| the expensive jobs both less efficient and happy.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| That also never happened, did it?
|
| Is there a "standard" medical record, or does each system
| implement its own proprietary format? Are the records
| transferrable? If so, why am I asked to fill out a
| complete medical history form on paper every time I visit
| the a doctor, as if I'm a new patient, when all the
| doctors I see are in the same network and presumably use
| the same EHR system.
| prlyons wrote:
| Another reason is to satisfy insurers increasing demands for
| documentation to backup billing.
| kakoni wrote:
| > I don't think productivity was ever the goal of this
| software.
|
| Well, EHR is a glorified billing platform.
| covidiot5 wrote:
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| At Uni as a summer job I worked processing Corporate Actions
| for a large custodial bank. We used exactly the same kind of
| system where every action was 4 characters. I can still
| remember some of them despite it being 10 years since I did
| that job. Even more importantly, the screens were trivially
| scriptable so lots of the grunt work could be handled by
| writing export scripts, pulling a bunch of data into excel,
| processing it and occasionally posting the results back the
| same way.
|
| Absolutely no way a modern system could be half as efficient,
| short of completely automating the whole job (which involved
| a lot of communication with other parties and basically
| freeform restrictions).
| yamtaddle wrote:
| They also fought it because they didn't go to medical school
| and survive residency to fill out forms all damn day--and
| they didn't used to have to, they had staff for that.
|
| Then the computerized systems "replaced" that staff but all
| that really means is they cut the human time needed low
| enough that full-time workers weren't needed, but didn't
| _eliminate_ it, so now that 's another thing doctors have to
| do themselves.
|
| AFAI can tell, the effect of tech overall is to cut some jobs
| while making the remaining ones harder and more stressful,
| while increasing so-called context switching.
| nradov wrote:
| Some healthcare provider organizations now employ medical
| scribes who follow physicians around and do all their EHR
| data entry. This is expensive, but can be cost effective
| because then the physicians have more time to perform
| billable procedures.
| drewbeck wrote:
| Ah this is great to hear. I been thinking about this
| approach for a while. Great to hear it's a Thing.
| warbler73 wrote:
| The least capable doctor's time is worth $300/hr. The
| scribe is paid what, $25/hr?
|
| This is so much like hearing of engineers that will not
| hire a $20/hr maid due to egalitarian reasons so they
| squat in filth or waste all their free hours cleaning,
| all while capable and willing cleaners starve. Insane.
| dfadsadsf wrote:
| You are overestimating how much least capable doctor
| makes (more like 100-150k) and underestimating how much
| somebody who can type medical information makes (more
| like $30-$35).
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Any competent engineer should at least have a maid,
| driver, nanny, servant, chef, gardener, pool cleaner, a
| mistress, dog walker and personal assistant /s
| yamtaddle wrote:
| If so, that's hilarious, because that's precisely one of
| the jobs all these expensive, painful-to-use computer
| systems were supposed to replace. You'd take a year or
| two course at junior college, to learn shorthand and
| drill some medical terminology so you'd be less likely to
| make a bunch of simple transcription mistakes, then go to
| work.
| nradov wrote:
| There's still a fairly large job market for medical
| transcriptionists, but that's a different job than being
| a medical scribe. Transcriptionists don't use shorthand
| any more, they mostly work from digital voice recordings.
| And they're typically not transcribing from scratch; now
| usually a voice recognition system does the first pass
| and then the human edits it to fix the ~2% errors.
| Transcriptionists don't usually work directly in EHRs,
| but their documents are fed into EHRs.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Microsoft recently bought Nuance for this very reason.
| t-writescode wrote:
| Sounds like modern startup devops-without-devops culture
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| Shift left amirite? Same with DBAs.
| lamontcg wrote:
| Don't need DBAs if you're hiring 10x full stack
| developers.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Seems an artefact of doctors not being employees.
|
| If their employment status was the same as everyone else's,
| there wouldn't be any effort to replace admin staff with
| someone getting paid 10x as much unless there was actually
| a 90% reduction in work (doubtful).
| mattkrause wrote:
| Laughs from academia....
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Trick is to be hourly!
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| You can reduce 90% of the work - but if the remaining 10%
| is shifted to someone that gets paid 50x as much, it's
| still a loss.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I, yes, that was their point. You're just saying the same
| thing with different numbers.
| hinkley wrote:
| > they cut the human time needed low enough that full-time
| workers weren't needed
|
| No, that's not it at all. What GP is saying is that they
| cut the human _expertise_ low enough that full-time workers
| weren 't needed. The manpower savings never materialized
| because an app built for experts is faster than one built
| for casual users, and also because those experts, even with
| the high training cost, were ultimately cheaper per hour
| than the highly compensated people who now have to do the
| job because we 'made it easy'. First you devalue those
| experts by making their job harder, then you get rid of the
| job and make it someone else's, split between entry level
| staff and your most expensive employees.
|
| > AFAI can tell, the effect of tech overall is to cut some
| jobs while making the remaining ones harder and more
| stressful, while increasing so-called context switching.
|
| You still got there in the end.
| StillBored wrote:
| But the doctors almost always were taking notes anyway. My
| step father (A doctor) fought a losing battle against
| electronic records because he had _decades_ of paper
| records stored in the "records" room of his office. That
| was largely the responsibility of the front desk to pull
| the patients records and have them ready for him to
| read/check before seeing the patient. Then clean them up
| and refile them. Long term patients had pages and pages of
| hand written notes, prescription histories, etc.
|
| So a part of the job has always been the record keeping,
| OTOH, as one of the other users mentioned, I've seen enough
| Dr's using their computer records systems to know that
| software is mostly garbage. The Dr's spend 2-4x the time
| dealing with the shitty UI as actually typing in the notes
| now.
|
| (In the end he basically retired instead of convert to
| electronic records).
| analog31 wrote:
| I've never seen the same doctor twice in a row.
|
| What I've noticed is that EMR has greatly reduced the
| amounts of screw-ups or delays caused by not having the
| right information at hand, or having to repeat tests.
| Also, since there's now a terminal in every examining
| room, I can see what amount of effort is required to use
| the EMR tool (Epic in the case of my provider), and it
| doesn't seem all that onerous. I can guesstimate the
| additional amount of time that they spend outside of
| clinic hours, completing their records for the day, and
| again, it doesn't seem onerous.
|
| For a few years I had to fill out a lengthy medical
| history form, every time I visited a clinic, but that's
| pretty much gone today. My primary care doctor just
| retired, and her replacement took up the baton without
| skipping a beat. She can also easily delegate to her
| physician's assistant or nurse practitioner, so they can
| all work as a team, with instant access to the same
| information.
|
| Now I have noticed something interesting. The urgent and
| primary care clinics all have a terminal in every
| examining room, and the clinicians perform their
| examinations while seated at the terminal, except when
| they actually have to poke around. That's where it seems
| quite efficient.
|
| In the hospital wards, they still don't have a terminal
| in each room, meaning that each clinician has to look
| things up at centralized terminals, remember them (or
| not), and has no access to information. If they need some
| information, they will come back with it, next time their
| make their rounds, which might be the next day. And they
| screw up. My dad had an episode that took him through an
| ER, to a regular hospital bed for a few days, then to a
| rehab ward. I had all of his records at my fingertips
| thanks to MyChart on my laptop. The doctors and nurses
| were lost, they completely overlooked the documented
| diagnosis that was at the root of is condition, and
| didn't believe me about it.
|
| Some of the nurses in the hospitals now have a terminal
| on a wheeled cart, that they bring on their rounds.
|
| What I'm guessing is that in the days of handwritten
| records, the doctors were mostly winging it.
| toss1 wrote:
| Sounds about right
|
| For those that seemed to transfer successfully, I noted
| that at Mayo Clinic, the doctors use live dictation
| software and dictate at least some of their notes into
| the system while the patient is present near the end.
| This immediate review sometimes brings up a few new
| questions (from either Dr or patient), and a bit more
| notetaking. So, it looks like a very efficient system.
| They also have no apparent shortage of staff organizing
| things.
|
| That said, I doubt every medical organization and office
| has the same quality setup as a top world-class
| institution. At some level of degradation, the system
| becomes more of a hindrance than a help, and that point
| is likely fairly near the top levels (so most of it is a
| hindrance).
| bombcar wrote:
| Dictating while the patient is there is brilliant,
| because it double-checks both the doctor and the
| patient's understanding of what happened.
| covidiot5 wrote:
| ameister14 wrote:
| That and the staff actually doubled over the same period
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| We can use an all HTML, Javascript-free interface that people
| can still memorize and quickly Tab through.
| conductr wrote:
| But that's not what anyone was selling at the time. I'm
| sure complexity has only increased since then.
|
| It was pre-AJAX and pre-"Javascript being useful", I think
| even pre-Firefox and was IE6 only. So it was loading java
| applets and stuff to just get some basic functionality
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| >This is when I formed my "never replace a terminal based
| app, with a GUI based app and expect productivity gains"
| theory.
|
| Not in medicine (run a small e-commerce business selling
| mostly used video games), but definitely noticed the same
| thing for us.
|
| We have some terminal-based Python scripts I wrote to
| automate a lot of the data entry tasks like listing and
| shipping (entering tracking numbers, printing labels).
|
| Everyone that uses the scripts is initially apprehensive, but
| then after maybe a day of getting used to the terminal turns
| into a powerful data entry God and they love it. Even had an
| employee gush about our shipping tool to a random supplier.
| StillBored wrote:
| 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, Remember that the F in File was underlined along with
| the "S" in Save (or whatever). Which would lead people to
| just press ctrl-s, or Alt-F, S. Then part of testing was
| making sure that that the tab key moved appropriately from
| field to field,etc.
|
| I remember in the 1990's spending a fair amount of time doing
| keyboard optimization in a "reporting" application I wrote
| (which also had an early touchscreen) for use by people who's
| main job wasn't using a computer. Then we would have
| "training" classes and watch how they learned to use it.
|
| So, much of this has been lost with modern "GUI's", even the
| OS vendors which should have been keeping their human
| interface guidelines updated, did stupid things like _HIDE_
| the accelerator keys in windows if the user wasn't pressing
| the Alt key. Which destroys discoverability, because now
| users don't have the shortcut in their face. Nevermind the
| recent crazy nonsense where links and buttons are basically
| the same thing, sometimes triggering crazy behaviors like
| context menus and the like. Or just designing UI's where its
| impossible to know if something is actually a button because
| the link text is the same color as the rest of the text on
| the screen..
| deadbunny wrote:
| In my experience the rise of GUIs over TUIs they lost the
| command buffering. If you knew what you were doing with a
| well designed TUI you could hit a sequence of keys that
| would be buffered and "replayed" as the next screen(s)
| loaded. Hit a sequence of commands in a GUI and they'll
| just get lost after the first one as the app/website loads.
| conductr wrote:
| It's also because it's enterprise software. Which actually
| isn't software, it's more of a platform. You have to do so
| much implementation detail that the GUI is just the result
| of some form-builder type module. Everything I've ever
| encountered that was enterprise software, felt like it's
| GUI was not made by humans at all. I don't actually know
| how they get built but they're almost never optimized for
| humans or the usage they're meant to benefit.
| badpun wrote:
| Nobody wants to pay for better GUIs in enterprise
| software, so no vendor puts any attention into them. An
| Enterprise Architect explicitly explained to me (when I
| was raising a point of choosing a software package that
| had much better UI) that good UX is a small factor and
| company (a bank in that case) would rather buy cheaper
| software and just have its workers suffer more, because
| it's deemed more cost-effective.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| This is true, look at time collection software or just
| about anything written with SAP.
| scarface74 wrote:
| The definition of enterprise software is "the customer is
| not the user". You don't have to make the user happy,
| just the CxO.
| bombcar wrote:
| And this is why the most polished part of most enterprise
| software packages is the dashboard/reporting function,
| the only part the C-levels might actually touch
| themselves.
| StillBored wrote:
| I've not done that kind of SW in a long time, and never
| with someone else's platform. But that said, the
| reporting application I was describing above was a
| platform in the same sense. It was largely an engine for
| generating the forms being filled out by the end users.
| Which is why it there was so much effort doing usability
| stuff, because the underlying form descriptions had to
| have tons of optimization flags for doing things like
| list sorting common items to the top N items of drop-
| downs, or moving fields around in the form to match the
| ways the users thought about filling out the forms.
|
| So there were two sides, the engine optimizations to
| assure things like tab orders on a form, and the was the
| actually writing the form descriptions. In the first
| couple organizations that adopted it I wrote the forms
| and the engine in parallel adding feature flags/controls
| as needed to support the desired UI outcomes. Later after
| I quit, the lady who wrote much of the RFP responses
| started writing the actual form descriptions because it
| was just as easy as drawing them out in the (visio?)
| plugin she was using with MS word and doing screen
| captures for the RFP. Then I guess because she knew how
| to do it, was doing the "tuning" as well.
| api wrote:
| 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.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| I suppose one way to save the situation would be to build
| libraries that allowed you to easily build tuis/efficient
| guis that interact with open-api or graphql endpoints? If
| there only was a way to encode the workflow in addition
| to just the apis it could almost be generated.
| ddoolin wrote:
| 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 likely stick to
| Excel if our solutions are more cumbersome (which is a high
| bar to meet/beat, but rightfully so). They need to be able
| to easily get to data and relevant, connected pieces of
| data, quickly enter data into relatively complex forms, and
| have it all be clear, reliable, and fault-tolerant. This
| means making some tradeoffs, particularly around what is
| considered modern UI aesthetics, and doing things most UI
| developers don't need to do such as automating little
| things, adding hotkeys, etc.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| So what you're saying is HTML5 and server side rendering
| should be the go to before any client side junk.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > 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 capturing
| hotkeys.
|
| Even multimedia content can be operated using hotkeys.
| Youtube is a good example. There's _no_ excuse but laziness
| and incompetence IMO.
|
| [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/HTML/Global_att...
| StillBored wrote:
| 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 whatever) to get there.
|
| If you watch people use the sabre command line interface
| (the one from the 1970s?), you can see some of what i'm
| talking about when people are just filling out the forms
| with the submission line, its less using the GUI and more
| just knowing some sequence of keystrokes that results in
| an action being taken.
|
| AKA its possible to do both, without having the user wear
| out the tab key, or grabbing the mouse all the time.
| ivlad wrote:
| It is a problem because with TUI keyboard is the first-
| class input device whereas with GUI and especially HTML
| it an afterthought most of times. Yes, there are
| exceptions like Twitter and Gmail and then there are
| millions other interfaces where mouse is the only way to
| navigate.
| bearjaws wrote:
| Are we sure the documentation isn't coming as required from the
| insurance companies?
|
| I know many Drs and especially nurses who CYA on all their
| documentation otherwise insurance will try to pin them on an
| adverse reaction.
| nradov wrote:
| Payers in general (not just insurance companies) require high
| levels of documentation both to prevent fraud and to increase
| care quality. Most healthcare providers are highly ethical
| and only act in their patients' best interest. But there are
| always a minority of bad actors who will try to boost revenue
| by submitting claims for procedures that weren't medically
| necessary, or weren't performed at all. So the system needs
| checks for that in order to hold down costs for everyone, and
| prevent iatrogenic harm.
|
| You will also find many cases where even good providers let
| things slip through the cracks and fail to give some patients
| the appropriate level of care. For example, diabetics should
| generally receive annual foot exams, eye exams, and
| hemoglobin A1c tests. If the payer doesn't see evidence of
| those in the EHR then they can prompt the doctor to resolve
| that care quality gap.
| warbler73 wrote:
| There are huge productivity gains in private practices that
| eliminate web pages and email and switch to paper in filing
| cabinets only. This is also why fax machines still exist and
| are exclusively used by medical practices.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I don't think "by almost any measure" is right. I think in a
| very narrow sense they've become less productive (they see
| fewer patients), but by your own admission they're building
| databases of patient data, which you seem to suppose are only
| useful to the likes of Epic, but obviously Epic has customers--
| notably healthcare researchers use this data to improve patient
| care, develop new medicines, and to precisely identify which
| medicines are likely to help on a particular patient (and which
| medicines may even harm them!). This is stuff clearly benefits
| society, and doctors' role in this should be counted as
| "productive", although we can quibble about the relative value
| of facilitating healthcare research versus seeing more
| patients.
|
| Note that this isn't meant to vouch for Epic--I work for a
| company that consumes their data and anyone who has to
| integrate with them has nothing good to say about the software,
| but the role it plays is still incredibly important.
| VLM wrote:
| Medical decisions are based primarily on financial profit,
| and patient outcome data is not required to determine which
| medicines are most profitable.
|
| The point of extensive documentation is shielding from the
| worst of malpractice lawsuits. The legal system is still of
| the legacy opinion that doctors have a responsibility to
| their patients as opposed to the more modern understanding of
| responsibility toward pharma company bottom lines, and all
| patients legally deserve the 100% successful participation
| trophy, so a documented decision with only 95% chance of
| success means insurance payouts about 5% of the time, unless
| its carefully documented it was all the patients fault or at
| least the MD could not have known the outcome in advance.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > patient outcome data is not required to determine which
| medicines are most profitable
|
| This is blatantly false. Pharma spends _tons_ of money to
| buy this data for their armies of researchers in order to
| determine outcomes. There 's an entire _very lucrative_
| industry (that I work in) which exists to source this data
| from hospitals and refine it for researchers.
|
| If the point of documentation was CYA, then you wouldn't
| need complicated systems like Epic to standardize the
| documentation and make it available for electronic
| processing (you would just have some paralegal pour over
| the records of the individual patient).
| coxmichael wrote:
| Both can be true, and greater systems of medical research and
| analysis don't necessarily lead to greater on-the-ground
| treatment.
|
| As you've pointed out, access to those information systems is
| critical. I'd add the distribution of that information as
| well as the right economic incentives to participate in using
| that information.
|
| I'm not sure we've really got any one of those things right.
|
| Edit: adding a bit of humanity to the system, as the OP is
| hinting at, could very much be a part of the fix.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > Both can be true
|
| Not really. You can't say "doctors have become less
| productive" without accounting for the value incumbent in
| the increased documentation effort.
|
| > greater systems of medical research and analysis don't
| necessarily lead to greater on-the-ground treatment.
|
| Maybe not "necessarily", but in practice they do. Perhaps
| not in every incidence, but broadly the analysis results in
| better outcomes or else there would be no economic
| incentive to facilitate medical research ("the incentive is
| to sell more drugs!" <- insurance companies aren't going to
| pay for those drugs if they aren't proven to work).
|
| > Edit: adding a bit of humanity to the system, as the OP
| is hinting at, could very much be a part of the fix.
|
| That's not how I understand the OP, but I doubt anyone
| would object to "adding a bit of humanity" (abstractly) to
| healthcare unless it implies a reduction in empirical
| rigor.
| coxmichael wrote:
| > broadly the analysis results in better outcomes or else
| there would be no economic incentive to facilitate
| medical research
|
| This is true to a degree, but outcomes for real
| healthcare rely on much more than research, as you've
| indicated.
|
| Documentation is part of that research, of course, and
| whether they have short-term or long-term effects for
| researchers' ability to work out better treatment is
| relatively lossy.
|
| Actual treatment also includes the rest of healthcare
| (training, hell, even their housing costs), and rules-
| based or centralised administrative systems backed by
| insurance don't necessarily create the right environment
| for that information to be propagated more widely.
|
| People training to be health workers don't use the
| frequency or quality of medical research papers to decide
| whether to become a doctor.
|
| I think there's a view you can take on the information
| topology here that's a little odd in how it's currently
| set up -- documentation for front-line workers and
| information wealth for researchers feels like it's
| relatively polarised.
| gort19 wrote:
| justinpombrio wrote:
| > notably healthcare researchers use this data to improve
| patient care, develop new medicines, and to precisely
| identify which medicines are likely to help on a particular
| patient (and which medicines may even harm them!)
|
| The majority of the notes being written by doctors now is
| boilerplate. A lot of it is copy-pasted. It's written because
| of insurance companies (which have incentive to deny claims),
| because of liability (which gives incentive to leave a lot of
| notes behind to make it looks like you thought about
| everything under the sun even if it wasn't applicable), and
| because of well-meaning but ultimately overly broad laws
| adding additional requirements even when they don't quite
| make sense.
|
| I'm sure there _is_ a treasure-trove of valuable data in
| there, especially compared to when it was all hidden away on
| physical paper. But you could probably reduce the paperwork
| that doctors do these days by a factor of 4 and not loose
| anything of value.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > But you could probably reduce the paperwork that doctors
| do these days by a factor of 4 and not loose anything of
| value.
|
| Maybe, but this sounds like some vague hunch based on ???.
| I very highly doubt the healthcare industry would tolerate
| doctors wasting ~37.5% of their time (75% of paperwork time
| is wasteful * 50% of doctors' time spent on paperwork =
| _minimum_ 37.5% of doctors time wasted). Doctors are
| _expensive_ , so recouping anywhere near 40% of their time
| would be a priority.
|
| It seems more likely that the paperwork is actually pretty
| useful (but the utility is not obvious to the lay
| observer), or at least useful enough that the wasted time
| isn't significant to the healthcare industry (which is
| already struggling with margins and personnel).
| tsol wrote:
| >I very highly doubt the healthcare industry would
| tolerate doctors wasting ~37.5% of their time (75% of
| paperwork time is wasteful * 50% of doctors' time spent
| on paperwork = minimum 37.5% of doctors time wasted).
| Doctors are expensive, so recouping anywhere near 40% of
| their time would be a priority.
|
| Doctors are expensive, but malpractice lawsuits are more
| expensive. Documentation is extremely important for
| lawsuits. If you get sued because a patient you saw last
| year later died and they're alleging improper health
| care(just to use a random example), it's highly dependent
| on having meticulously documented notes that document
| every single examination finding and treatment
| administered. Your memory isn't going to be accurate, and
| the prosecutor is going to be looking for any errors in
| documentation they can use.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I don't dispute the value of documentation for CYA. I'm
| saying that if CYA were the motivating use case,
| electronic medical systems would look a lot more like a
| Word document than like Epic (Epic is designed to
| standardize patient histories so they can be analyzed for
| research, not for paralegal convenience).
| justinpombrio wrote:
| Based on working in the industry, and hearing from
| healthcare practitioners not quite first-hand, but
| second-hand.
|
| You mention profit efficiency, but all three of my points
| make sense even in light of that: (i) insurance is
| literally the way doctors get paid; (ii) lawsuits are
| hella expensive, and (iii) regardless of profit
| incentives you can't not follow the law.
|
| The software that doctors use is _terrible_. It 's a
| perfect combination of extreme complexity, domination by
| just a couple companies (Epic and Cerner), legacy
| software (some still written in mumps, I hear!), and tons
| and tons of regulation.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS
| bumby wrote:
| This is a really good point about how we myopically
| understand the value stream of a process. Often, steps that
| we feel are bureaucratic waste provide a lot of value to
| someone else in the process.
|
| With that said, I think most healthcare is correct to take a
| "patient centric" approach. What the OP seems to be making is
| a "doctor centric" take and, if one was to be overly cynical
| (I'm not), your post may skew to the side of a "researcher
| centric" or "societal centric" approach. Doctors should do
| what's best for their patient, not necessarily what's best
| for society, or themselves, or a lawyer, or a research lab.
| It's easy if you work in one of those tangential areas to
| take your eye off the ball.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I don't think documentation precludes doctors from caring
| for their patients, but it does limit the number of
| patients they can handle. This implies that healthcare is
| more expensive, which maybe seems like a bad thing for
| patients, but I think it's more of an indicator that we
| need to find a way as a society to pay for the societal
| good that is data collection and research--"medicare for
| all" is one conceivable incarnation.
| bumby wrote:
| > _but it does limit the number of patients they can
| handle._
|
| Or, by extension, it limits the amount of time with each
| patient if they have a throughput constraint to stay
| solvent.
|
| Tbf, I'm not sure the data supports the claim that
| doctors spend less time with patients, but the increase
| in documentation does seem to correlate with doctor
| burnout.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Well said. Particularly on the value of trust within systems.
|
| In case it's of interest I wrote an article a couple of days
| ago on how "Digital Systems Fail Institutions" [1].
|
| [1] https://techrights.org/2022/10/26/when-digital-systems-
| fail/
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > 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.
|
| It's less the software, and more the users, site-specific
| configuration and the environment they work in.
|
| Non-US Epic users spend 20-60% less time on various EHR
| activities than their US counterparts. One of the most dramatic
| differences is time spent on ordering, which you would think
| would be as optimized as it could be.
|
| Time spent documenting was 40 minutes/day for US users and 30
| for non-US on average. Maybe some spend 50%, but that's far
| from average.
|
| https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
|
| Another study found US clinicians write 4x longer notes (cited
| in above).
|
| Now, does any of this improve clinical outcomes?
| dan_quixote wrote:
| > Another study found US clinicians write 4x longer notes
|
| I wasn't aware of this, but as the spouse of a medical
| provider I know that most US providers are burdened with an
| ever-present worry about malpractice.
| vanc_cefepime wrote:
| This. So much this. In residency we are taught "document,
| document, document" and "this is a medical legal document"
| which leads to defensive medicine. Another point of why we
| spend more time documenting is billing. Coders/billers
| continue to come back and asking us to add more details
| about a diagnosis. More details = more charges to bill or
| up level. So the next progress note or office visit, I go
| back to add more. More time is spent fighting the notes.
| Terrible EMRs that destroy notes is one that leads to more
| time spent as well. Looking at you Allscripts (aka Allshits
| in my office). Overall it's a sad state of medicine in the
| USA, which is terrible as when I was younger the whole
| point of medicine for me was to help people and focus on
| the patient and the issues that are ailing them. Now,
| patients are still important to me but it's a race to the
| bottom trying to document while in seeing the patients so I
| can go home without paperwork and live my life. I got bills
| to pay, a 6 figure student loan that will take me another
| decade to pay off. At some point, it's all going break
| down. Few of us are doing the concierge direct primary care
| model to avoid all this which will unfortunately lead to
| more health disparities and inequalities.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > concierge direct primary care model
|
| How does this reduce/eliminate the "better document this
| thoroughly in case I get sued" work?
|
| Or are the legal worries overblown/over-relied upon for
| over-documentation?
| Scoundreller wrote:
| To clarify, the length was 4x longer. Some of the
| discrepancy is attributed to more keystrokes, but a lot of
| it is copying/auto-inserting stuff.
|
| These automated analyses don't capture whether the extra
| content is beneficial or not (it might be!).
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| > 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 through each
| individual order, often depending on the peculiarities of the
| app's UI and how the designers expect the process to carry out:
| _"Are you all having the set menu? No? OK, first I need to know
| how many of you are having it? "_ [taps count on screen] _"
| Right, now I need the starters but ONLY for the set menu
| orders..."_ etcetera--you get the idea. Then, while going
| through this unnecessarily slow process, God forbid someone who
| ordered from the set menu wants to change their main while the
| waiter is already taking the a la carte orders.
|
| Meanwhile, in restaurants that _haven 't_ unnecessarily
| techified the procesz, the waiter can take the order in the way
| that's most practical given the circumstances and that best
| fits his way of taking notes. Ah, but then how does the order
| reach the kitchen without the tech? I have no idea, all I can
| say is that it worked fine before these things were put in
| place, and the manual system is by far the quickest and most
| flexible from a customer's point of view.
| VLM wrote:
| 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 pause, so they have peculiar
| ideas resulting in enforcement of weird and unproductive
| business processes.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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 frustration to the point where I hardly ever go to
| these places anymore. And then they wonder why their year-
| over-year sales are declining.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Our nearest McDonalds has a Siri-like virtual assistant
| thing taking orders at the drive-through. They've had to
| add taped-on paper notes telling people what it expects
| them to say to end the order. If you order anything with
| a number in the name, it may give you that many of it
| instead of one of it. I don't know how well it does at
| modifying mistakes but I'd bet the answer is "it can't,
| it just tells you to pull forward and talk to a real
| person".
|
| It sucks.
|
| And yeah, the damn order-kiosks manage to take saying the
| words "large black coffee" and turn it into a two-minute
| process.
|
| Like "automated" checkouts, they're not automation,
| they're just making customers do more work than paid
| workers used to, to achieve the same outcome. The work's
| still happening, and is _less_ efficient, the businesses
| just aren 't having to pay for it. That's not automation.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Waiters put the bits of paper they're writing on on a rack in
| the kitchen. Other times, they shout out the orders and
| remember which table gets what.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| And shreds it all at the end of the day before the tax guy
| shows up.
|
| Though Quebec, Canada, had such a problem with "zappers"
| that would delete orders from the electronic system that
| every restaurant now must be online with the tax authority
| and every receipt has a tax authority response code on the
| top.
| dleslie wrote:
| Here in BC, Canada, many places don't even provide you a
| menu. You're expected to scan a QR code on the table, then
| use the website it leads you to. So the table fumbles around
| with their phones, using a website that usually has a
| terrible UX, and then the server arrives and enters your
| order on their tablet.
|
| At least they don't require that we install an App. But I'm
| sure someone's thinking that would be a good idea.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| QR codes mean there are no menus to clean off.
| danjoredd wrote:
| What upsets me are those dumb QR Code menus. Battery dead?
| Out of service? No food for you amigo.
| maxrev17 wrote:
| 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.
| thebradbain wrote:
| 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 humanity has
| gotten by just fine with for ages (the first since the dawn
| of civilization!)
|
| As a general rule to "will this be tech useful" I think in
| terms of scale-- is this new tech enabling/helping me to
| do/manage something 10x-100x better than I could with
| existing tools? Sure, I can organize a single
| dinner/cocktail party of a couple dozen people via paper
| invites or text messages and phone calls to caterers, and
| using tech for that is likely introducing unnecessary
| overhead, but if I'm a planner organizing many weddings of
| 100+ for a living then, yeah, obviously a party-planning
| management software will be of use.
|
| If not, its value is likely not worth the hassle.
|
| [1] https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/01/juic
| ero-s...
| lupire wrote:
| The article is about 2022 specifically, obviously pandemic
| related.
| scythe wrote:
| >Software doesn't know when its rules should be broken.
|
| Just to provide an example of this I ran into today: I'm doing
| a medical physics residency, and my supervisor was explaining
| that a new "fail-safe" incorporated into the software that
| reverted the collimator after every scan was now making the
| phototimer tests take twice as long, because we had to go back
| into the room and reset the collimator repeatedly. We tested a
| machine with the new system and one with the old system and it
| did in fact turn a 15-minute task into around 35 minutes.
| closeparen wrote:
| The big reason EMR is so overbearing is to optimize billing...
| as far as economic statistics, that should show up as positive
| even if less patient care is actually delivered.
| ocbyc wrote:
| To get anything done, it seems I must speak to >=2 people on
| any customer support line.
| cm42 wrote:
| "Just a billing platform with some patient stuff tacked on"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xB_tSFJsjsw
| FredPret wrote:
| Zdogg, MD made my day!
| Retric wrote:
| That documentation time is largely driven by the insurance
| industry which was really painful before these systems. It's
| almost shocking how much more productive doctors are inside the
| VA.
| derbOac wrote:
| Insurance is part of it, but not all of it. Government
| regulation is also a big part. EHR mandates under the Obama
| administration (? who I was generally supportive of, so not a
| criticism of his presidency in general) created a kind of
| "false pressure" to move to EHR immediately, rather than
| "naturally" adopt it at an organic pace, adopting whatever is
| most beneficial due to demand. I'm not anti EHR, but the way
| those systems were adopted were definitely forced onto
| providers top-down, rather than bottom-up like traditional
| hospital record systems. Hospitals scrambled to implement
| them in time for deadlines, and there was no room for
| pushback against poorly implemented structures that were
| pushed on hospitals essentially.
|
| More recently in my field I've seen additional layers of
| documentation requirements that have nothing to do with
| insurance, that are entirely state law.
|
| I have no doubt in my mind that if EHR rules didn't exist,
| they would have been adopted much more gradually, and
| selection would have been dictated by the ability of EHRs to
| supply features in demand. More competition would have
| existed and it would have cost less. Maybe some government
| regulation would have been needed in terms of
| interoperability standards but it could have been rolled out
| much much much better.
|
| I don't think people fully comprehend the cost overruns
| associated with adoption of EHRs under government mandates,
| or how big of a shift there was from records being in-house
| flexible, and provider and patient-driven, to out-of-house
| inflexible, and IT-corporation-driven.
| supertrope wrote:
| To play devil's advocate without the stick of Medicare
| funding being at stake, doctor's offices and hospitals will
| defer EHR upgrades until the heat death of the universe.
| HIPAA was passed in the 90s with a safe harbor for faxing
| and that's still the standard method to transfer a medical
| record.
| kps wrote:
| > It's almost shocking how much more productive doctors are
| inside the VA.
|
| Cerner has a contract to fix that.
| pastaguy1 wrote:
| What?
| VLM wrote:
| Cerner got $10B a couple years ago to prevent the VA
| system from working. Its happening per plan, so far.
| pdntspa wrote:
| I am seeing all this blah blah blah about how everything pins
| down to insurance.
|
| But if medical pricing was such that insurance wasn't
| required, then patients would better audit their own care
| receipts and this fraud issue would eliminate itself, and as
| a side benefit we'd have sane pricing for medical care.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > 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.
|
| My daughter works at Epic, and she explained that one (though
| not the only one) of the big reasons health care is so
| expensive is because Drs have so many record-keeping
| requirements, and one reason they have these is because of
| liability (another is patient record portability). It would
| greatly help if Americans weren't so lawsuit trigger-happy. The
| real winners are the lawyers (and insurance companies).
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| Brilliant observation.
|
| In a way, all might be a huge early optimization.
| [deleted]
| Tsarbomb wrote:
| Having once worked in the EMR/EHR space, a big thing to
| consider is some companies come in with their own workflows,
| processes, and ideas that they want to push onto physicians
| while other companies are way more accommodating in building
| "bespoke" solutions to specific problems.
|
| The latter in my experience ends up providing better results to
| physicians as they have been employed as domain experts in
| building the software solution to their specific workflow. I've
| seen it done for in ophthalmology, specific disease/injury
| specific radiology, and diabetic specific checkup and
| appointments where I've seen as much as a 75% reduction in the
| amount of time the physician has to dedicate lookup up info,
| cross-referencing, and documenting.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > other companies are way more accommodating in building
| "bespoke" solutions to specific problems.
|
| Then you upgrade and everything breaks!
|
| But it's an age old battle for and against standardization. I
| just walk around with several charging cables because each is
| "the best" for charging a small li-ion battery.
| nottorp wrote:
| Last time I had a blood test it took 2 minutes to take my blood
| and 15 to enter crap in various forms on the computer. And I'm
| not even in the US. There was a lot of clicking involved.
|
| To contrast, my first job was an accounting program. We spent
| weeks on making sure everything works via just the keyboard and
| some operations are as streamlined as possible. Because in some
| cases it was going to be used by people creating hundreds of
| invoices per day.
| danabrams wrote:
| We just had a baby this month, and I was shocked by how much
| time the medical staff was spending entering data into Epic. So
| much that they couldn't actually fully concentrate on giving
| medical care.
|
| Everyone was very busy but it was very hard to get actual care.
| Eleison23 wrote:
| The last good, independent physician I had was a fellow who
| played Chess on the weekends downtown. His practice moved about
| 5 times while I was a patient and he finally was snapped up by
| the VA.
|
| He habitually called me "friend" and was very frank about my
| insurance not paying for stuff I was asking about, which I
| appreciated. He also once profusely apologized to me for
| placing a computer in between us. He said the new requirements
| of his practice made it so he had to pay more attention to the
| computer than to me, and we were both sad about that.
|
| The doctors I got after that make no such apologies.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Reminds me of this anecdote:
| https://notalwaysright.com/trying-to-get-a-word-in-until-
| you...
|
| It may or may not be true (I suspect some of the stories on
| that site are made from whole cloth), but it speaks to your
| post.
| chaostheory wrote:
| You're blaming tech for legal issues and requirements.
| godelski wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I'd ask another question: did lawsuits decrease? I'd imagine
| that a lot of this software is to avoid lawsuits. America is
| especially litigious and that's got to correlate strongly with
| the increase bureaucracy.
|
| I also suspect that a factor at play is that people are losing
| trust in the whole system. Most people now know that
| productivity has skyrocketed while salaries have remained
| relatively flat. With increasing economic disparity (not even
| just the West) it is no wonder that people become less
| productive. Who tries hard at a game that they believe is
| rigged against them? (doesn't matter if it is or isn't, just
| the belief)
|
| > People in tech keep thinking more tech will solve problems
|
| Because historically it has. But there are different types of
| tech. Tech enabled the modern world. It is the new medicines we
| have to cure illnesses that devastated populations. It is the
| chemicals that enable us to grow enough food to sustain our
| populations. It is everything from a wheel to the computers we
| use to make more efficient wheels that use less resources. But
| it is also naive to think that tech alone can solve every
| problem. It is also naive to think that tech can't create new
| problems. To create tech that solves problems we need to think
| long and hard about the intricate complexities involved and
| gather the expertise from relevant domains (an often missed,
| but essential, component). The other problem is that people
| hand wave away things like climate change saying "tech will
| solve it" rather than investing in said technology and waiting
| for it to magically appear. I do think tech is an important
| tool in solving many of the problems we face, but you're right
| that they are not all technology dependent (which is a
| continuous scale of weights, not a binary option).
|
| Also, we're a tech forum. Peoples' expertise here is in tech.
| So they see things through that lens and it is also very likely
| that the most we/they can contribute to solving these problems
| is, in fact, through technological means. The trick is to
| remember that tech isn't a cure-all and that the problems we
| face are exceedingly complex. Over simplifying is often
| harmful.
| [deleted]
| sharadov wrote:
| Don't you worry, the next gen of block chain apps which are
| built on a bedrock of implicit trust, will make your concerns
| moot.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| Message passing was basically a solution for this in the tech
| world. Send messages to everyone and if they implement that
| message then they act.
| kewrkewm53 wrote:
| I agree. Here in Finland the public healthcare organization in
| capital region and surrounding areas chose Epic as supplier of
| their new system. It has been a disaster, massive complaints
| from doctors about how unproductive it is to use, and also some
| issues that endanger patient safety. Apparently it's also
| programmed with MUMPS, which doesn't exactly sound a great idea
| in 21th century.
|
| I'm not sure whether this choice was a case of incompetence or
| corruption, but the end result is clearly a giant waste of
| money. Maybe it generates a lot of data, but efficiency would
| be way more important for an organization like this which is
| chronically underfunded and staffed.
| drewbeck wrote:
| I talk a lot about this flexibility gap in my day job in UX.
| Getting an organization onto a digital platform is great but a
| lot of them don't recognize all the small ways that their
| current system's flexibility is helping them.
|
| With big systems though I honestly think GUIs can only go so
| far, even at their very best, and any system that is required
| to be complex at some level will require expert knowledge of
| the system itself. That's extra work and an extra burden for
| someone with the critical experience that an organization
| relies on.
|
| For doctors and the like it would make sense to try a system
| where the critical person/expert has an assistant who is a
| systems expert and does a lot of the needed data entry and the
| like. Doctor doesn't have to worry about the system, they can
| talk to the assistant who manages all the extra work. If the
| system needs to change for any reason the assistant manages
| that and the doctor doesn't have to worry about it.
|
| I think of this assistant role as the human API layer. It's not
| far off from some social programs like insurance navigators,
| who help individuals find health insurance, including working
| through options and even--critically--filling out forms for
| folks.
|
| ETA: It's a thing! I didn't know:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_scribe
| lumost wrote:
| This shouldn't be surprising. For the majority of us workers -
| output no longer correlates to remuneration. Working hard just
| means that you have slightly more money to live paycheck to
| paycheck on.
| nonasktell wrote:
| How about a giant freaking pandemic.
| unity1001 wrote:
| Surely, it cant be financial insecurity, uncertain future, and
| not getting anywhere regardless of how much work they put in. It
| definitely cant be that the capitalist system has already
| squeezed the last drops of productivity from people in the last
| few decades and there is no more. It definitely can't be that
| what Marx predicted already happened and the majority of people
| don't have access to means of generating wealth/income, being
| unable to consume, therefore putting the economy into a crisis of
| growth and profitability.
|
| No one is sure why. Its just a mystery.
| forrest2 wrote:
| Anecdote:
|
| I'm a midwesterner and half of my siblings, most of my wife's
| siblings, and some of my friends' siblings are in their late 20s,
| have no jobs (or <10 hrs a week), and live with their parents.
|
| From the outside, they look nervous / afraid to try to get into
| the job market or to date people. Men & women, but it leans men.
| The ones in poorer families stay home all day and play video
| games, and the richer ones venture out to spend their parent's
| money at restaurants or on trips but otherwise do the same. Half
| of them were doing minimum-wage work and left at the start of the
| pandemic and the other half have never had jobs.
|
| I could just be in a local pocket of people like this, but I'm
| worried about how many people must have fallen off of the wagon
| and will never get back on.
|
| Trying to get a skilled entry-level job after having done
| literally nothing for 5 years is hard for a lot of reasons. One
| being the mental hurdle you have to get over: you know you'll
| face a lot of rejection, you're out of practice, and your work
| peers will be a lot younger.
|
| --------------
|
| Controversial opinion: The whole thing has burnt me on UBI. I am
| afraid that the average American doesn't have the discipline to
| be productive if we introduce too much free income / free state
| of subsistence.
|
| A great counter-argument is "well why does someone have to be
| productive? why should anyone have to work?". I don't know
| anything, but I suspect that we get to ask that question because
| of how dominant/rich the US is, and that is bound to end if we
| aren't more than competitive against countries that work their
| asses off.
|
| Another counter is something like: exceptional people are
| responsible for the 10x-1000x outcomes that carry the economy,
| but those individuals are only the catalyst and do it on the
| backs of the rest of us. Takes all parts to make the machine
| work.
|
| --------------
|
| Back on topic. Here's some graphs:
|
| FRED Graphs:
|
| Hours worked by full-time and part-time employees by year:
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/B4701C0A222NBEA
|
| US Pop: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/POPTOTUSA647NWDB
|
| Median weekly real earnings:
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
|
| Employment-Population Ratio - 25-54 Yrs.:
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060
|
| Real gross domestic product per capita
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA --------
|
| US Employment rate by age 2000-2021:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/217899/us-employment-rat...
| fundad wrote:
| Not In The Labor force is a huge phenomenon and has been since
| before pandemic. I don't think it's just pockets I think there
| is a widespread cultural aversion to sacrifice now for yourself
| and your future kids.
|
| If your local economy is in decline, you see more people
| demoralized and jobs dry up in a cycle.
|
| I think I read the term "futureless generation" recently and
| that stuck with me.
| trollerator23 wrote:
| Why, it's the working from home of course.
| psychoslave wrote:
| Are they happier? Great.
|
| Otherwise well, less crap produced and reaching the global market
| is already something nice to hear I guess.
| caseysoftware wrote:
| https://archive.ph/fTkHI
| cashsterling wrote:
| The article doesn't talk about how productivity is measured and
| the actual sensitivity and accuracy of the measurement(s). As
| others have pointed out, measuring productivity is a little hazy
| and probably is influenced by subjective bias (hey a recession
| might be coming... hmm, I feel like less work is getting done at
| my office).
|
| I wonder how much bias affects the reported measurements? I doubt
| businesses outside of manufacturing can actually discern a 2%
| change in productivity, when screening for other factors, and
| some of them can't discern a 5% change.
| konschubert wrote:
| I don't know how this is measured:
|
| Could the effect be caused by the US onshoring industries that
| have lower productivity?
| d_sem wrote:
| The article focuses on a productivity drop observed in 2022 as
| compared with the past two decades. Anecdotally, this is the
| first year I've been able to take a meaningful vacation since the
| pandemic started. Perhaps, the reduction of covid restrictions
| allowed individuals to improve their work-life balance in favor
| of more "life".
| FearlessNebula wrote:
| It's the phones. Our attention spans and ability to focus have
| been destroyed by constant little hits of dopamine.
| netsectoday wrote:
| This! All of the companies kept shortening their dopamine cycle
| to compete with each other and now people can't focus in real
| life for more than 5-10 seconds before they are mentally
| searching for the scroll button to find a new interaction.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| +1 I find watching TikTok or YouTube Shorts to be damaging to
| my concentration compared to what I consider (for myself) to be
| healthy activities like reading a book, watching or listening
| to an interesting interview or educational like philosophy,
| etc.
|
| I try to fight back by only having TikTok installed on a
| Chromebook that I don't often use and for YouTube Shorts, I
| count the number I have watched.
|
| On my cellphone, if I want to waste time, I prefer a quick game
| of Chess.
|
| I strongly recommend the https://freedom.to service as well as
| their podcasts.
| thebigspacefuck wrote:
| But why now? It seems like that would have happened sooner.
| FearlessNebula wrote:
| I suspect that phone usage went up substantially during the
| pandemic, and that had somewhat of a lag effect to show up in
| these reports.
| hooverd wrote:
| Phonebad isn't just a city in India.
| D13Fd wrote:
| It's not just the phones themselves, it's the modern social
| media apps (TikTok etc.). But I agree it seems to be twisting
| things up.
|
| I think a closely related issue is how everyone, everywhere,
| all the time seems to be arguing about political ideologies, or
| making every issue about red vs. blue or liberal vs.
| conservative or racist vs. antiracist or whatever other way
| people want to split others up and then talk about it all day.
|
| I get that it's an election year in the US and people have done
| this for a long time, but I swear it feels like it is reaching
| an absolute fever pitch these past years that is different than
| before.
|
| Because it seems so all-consuming, I think it distracts people
| from work even more than in the past.
| superkuh wrote:
| "hits of dopamine" is not really how it works. Drugs like
| methamphetamine or cocaine directly give you "hits" of
| dopamine. Perceiving a stimuli through your senses does not
| directly manipulate the dopaminergic neuronal populations. It's
| just like any other stimuli where, if the stimulus is actually
| intrinsically rewarding, eventually the dopaminergic
| populations in your brain begin to associate the stimuli with
| potential for reward. This leads to an increased perception of
| the salience of that particular set of stimuli.
|
| This is very different from cocaine which can cause humans to
| perceive stimuli as more important and potentially more
| rewarding even without any rewarding component to the stimuli
| at all.
|
| Using a computer is not a drug. Stimuli on a screen are no
| different from stimuli from looking at something else. Using a
| smart phone does not give you "hits" of dopamine. Stop
| conflating normal environmental stimuli with drugs that act
| directly in the brain. It is dangerous because the way
| governments deal with drugs, and the very real addictions
| possible, is violence. Bringing violence into this non-violent
| non-coercive context is immoral.
| cm42 wrote:
| I agree with your ultimate conclusion ("Using a computer is
| not a drug"), and that this is an important consideration,
| but to play with the forest-trees thing here, _the stimulus_
| I think most people perceive and /or conditioned to is the
| alert tone and/or vibration, which I believe has been argued
| to (not in their words) have some inherent salience, once the
| user is conditioned by carrying a phone around for a while,
| at least.
|
| I believe this is one of the avenues argued for "Tech
| Addictive"/"Screens Bad" - that the intrinsic value of
| _bzzzzzt_ could, at least hypothetically, be as high as, say,
| nudes or an "omw" text, or even your dealer texting he's
| 5min away; and that this inflated value is in turn projected,
| however briefly, onto every once-in-a-lifetime sale and
| useless 3am app notification about an icon set update or
| something.
|
| There's also obviously the much-written-about addictive UI/UX
| features employed in various places. I vaguely recall one or
| two unfortunate email chains, maybe, but am assuming most
| product teams didn't go into meetings with nefarious
| intentions of getting their users psychologically addicted.
|
| Nevertheless, addictions can be triggered by adjacent things,
| and however little dopamine "all the little red little
| circles all over the place" release in my grandmother's brain
| is probably very different from a chainsmoking coke user
| taking a swig from his bottle as he picks up his phone to
| see: - 32 New Facebook notifications! - Your dispensary order
| is ready for pickup! - sexybabe_notabot69 liked your profile!
| - Your bank account is overdrawn! - 18 new Twitter
| notifications! - ALL NEW SLOT MACHINES! NOW WITH DIFFERENT
| KINDS OF FRUIT AND SHAPES! - You're never gonna learn Spanish
| if you keep doing drugs, Carl! - DON'T MISS OUT! JIMMY BUFFET
| LIVE AT THE CASINO THIS WEEKEND! - Your order has shipped! -
| YOU'RE GONNA LOSE YOUR VIP STATUS IF YOU DON'T COME BACK HERE
| AND GAMBLE - Re: Hey - THIS WEEKEND ONLY!!!! ANNUAL ONCE-IN-
| A-LIFETIME SALE!
|
| I think I could probably make the argument that maximizing
| for, say, MAUs/DAUs, is essentially an addictive cycle - a la
| "valueless reward" - in the business process, probably citing
| lots of business types who have written lots about how
| optimizing for the wrong metrics will leave your company
| broke and homeless too.
|
| So, I guess I'm saying "Using a computer is not a drug",
| particularly as you used it, is nearly indisputably true, but
| somewhat misses the conversation being had (however dumb),
| and that it's worth looking at all of the links in the causal
| chain and examining how, for example, alarm fatigue and
| <sleep stuff> compare and contrast (and occur comorbidly
| with) actual addictive and/or depressive syndromes - for
| exactly the reasons you listed, like:
|
| "We've found that homeless people using Facebook are xy.z%
| more likely to relapse on heroin, don't understand
| statistics, and therefore don't allow our clients to use the
| internet, except for this one from 2005 that lets them
| digitally sign the form we need to get reimbursed for the
| bed."
| superkuh wrote:
| If you want to argue this then at least use the correct
| description of the proximal cause, "hits of glutamate in
| the shell of the nucleus accumbens and ventral tegmental
| area". It doesn't roll off the tongue and focusing on the
| neurochemistry ignores the context. So maybe it's better to
| just say it simply, "If you enjoy doing an enjoyable thing
| and you do it a lot you'll anticipate liking it more than
| reality provides on average."
| theGnuMe wrote:
| Umm, you might want to read up on dopamine and how it works.
| The Huberman lab podcast has a great episode.
| superkuh wrote:
| I tend to stick to journal articles. You should checkout
| the review articles at the Berridge lab,
| https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/berridge-lab/publications/
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| Phones were invented this year? Or why did they have an effect
| only just now?
| Ancalagon wrote:
| Actually, this seems correct to me.
| [deleted]
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| My guess is it's related to inflation. Changing costs can cause
| people and companies to adjust to different economic conditions,
| and that adjustment can hurt productivity.
|
| Something similar happened in the mid-seventies.
|
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB
| cestith wrote:
| It's difficult to be productive when you're waiting on a shipment
| of parts, for one thing. We've been working for decades to make
| industries work with more advanced logistics and less stock on
| hand. Now there are supply chain issues, and you can't assemble
| and sell something if you don't have the parts whether it's a
| car, a computer, or a rose hip half skim gigante honey latte.
|
| Real wages are up a bit, but revenues are way up despite the
| supply chain issues. People are being forced back into offices
| who don't need to be there. Maybe morale is low. I know of
| concrete instances of low morale, and I'm sure there are others.
|
| People's life changing because of RTO requires attention.
|
| People are often looking to move or to change jobs recently,
| which requires attention.
|
| Millions of people have been ill with a respiratory/vascular
| virus which sometimes causes long term damage. More than a
| million in the US have died from it. Survivors often have
| pulmonary issues and long-term mental fog which may be permanent
| or take years to recover. They have less energy and stamina. It's
| harder for many of them to concentrate. Some of those who died
| were in the workforce, and whatever knowledge they had about
| their job died with them. Other deaths were people's family and
| friends. Funerals, cleaning out houses, donating their
| belongings, and the grief itself aren't exactly good for worker
| productivity but they are things humans need to do.
|
| Lots of micromanagers exist. For people who haven't returned to
| office with no open floor plan to walk around, many of them use a
| messaging app like Slack to micromanage. Water cooler
| conversation is in Slack channels. Meetings are in Slack, Teams,
| or Zoom or something else, and everyone's supposed to be engaged
| rather than working on their laptop until it's their turn to
| speak. There are often more officially designated meetings
| because people can't drop by one another's offices. Lots of work
| is concentration-based work, or "flow" work. Constant
| interruptions are bad for anyway, but when it takes 20 or 30
| minutes to get all the context in your head to solve a problem
| and a three-minute interruption to lose all of that, more
| interruptions can be catastrophic for productivity.
|
| Some types of business have minimum staffing requirements. You
| can cut staff and try to "right size", but you need enough staff
| to keep the place open if that's your goal. If orders are down
| enough, your staff will sometimes have less to do. If because of
| the shortages mentioned before your ability to fill orders is
| down, the same thing applies. You have a choice of eating some
| less profitable quarters until the supply chain levels out or
| just closing shop. You can't lay off 100% of your trained staff
| and count on rehiring them later.
| throwawaaarrgh wrote:
| Our past productivity also came with some of the longest working
| hours per year of any nation, iirc. Our pay never got improved
| and our living conditions worsened, we work too long, and we're
| sick of killing ourselves for corporations to become insanely
| rich. Of course we're not productive, we're sick of the bullshit.
| [deleted]
| whalesalad wrote:
| systemic burnout, overstimulation in all dimensions of life, the
| rat race is getting harder and harder
| [deleted]
| arberx wrote:
| Can I be naive and argue a simple explanation?
|
| Cheap money the last 13 years = hire more people who do less and
| get paid more. Or even hiring people for positions that aren't
| needed.
| rr808 wrote:
| Lots of people are productive WFH, but loads are taking it easy.
| Often in my team Fridays people barely dial in, maybe are
| connected a few hours max. Thursday afternoons now are dead as
| people get ready for the weekend... Job market is still strong so
| no one really cares that much as we know we're difficult to
| replace.
| [deleted]
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Excellent, this provides productive evidence for a 4 day work
| week if everything still runs with folks checked out on Fridays
| and they're not in the office performing work theater.
|
| https://www.4dayweek.com/
|
| Labor power in the face of a recession comes from dwindling
| labor supply. 360k boomers retire each month in the US. 1.8
| million people over the age of 55 die every year. Not enough
| folks to backfill.
|
| https://archive.ph/2022.10.27-015740/https://www.businessins...
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/11/09/the-pace-of...
|
| https://www.daytondailynews.com/local/rising-number-of-baby-...
| rr808 wrote:
| I'd like to agree but the article literally says employee
| output fell.
| [deleted]
| noptd wrote:
| >this provides productive evidence for a 4 day work week if
| everything still runs with folks checked out on Fridays and
| they're not in the office performing work theater.
|
| Not exactly. Unless 100% of workers are only working 4 day
| work weeks, it's impossible to account for the confounding
| variable of other workers picking up the slack when analyzing
| these trends from a macro view.
| duderific wrote:
| "Everything still runs" could be applied in a lot of
| situations, but it's not necessarily a desirable state.
|
| Everything still runs at McDonalds if there are half as many
| cashiers, but it will take a lot longer to get your Big Mac.
|
| Everything still runs at the hospital if there are half as
| many nurses, but the level of care is much worse.
|
| You get the idea.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| The data looks good so far.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/22/business/four-day-work-
| we...
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/04/01/four-day-workweek-
| pilot-...
|
| https://www.euronews.com/next/2022/10/07/the-four-day-
| week-w...
| pixl97 wrote:
| >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 decades.
| Cyberdog wrote:
| If this were to happen, then wouldn't people just start
| "checking out" on Thursdays?
| bluedino wrote:
| I switched jobs at the beginning of the year, and still haven't
| figured out if people here just don't work on Fridays or did
| that start with WFH?
| ryandrake wrote:
| Anecdote of one, but as someone whose job involves a lot of
| "pinging" and "chasing" people for approvals, code reviews,
| sign-offs and so on, I have found during the last couple of
| years, it's nearly impossible to get a reply out of people on
| Fridays, so I've learned that if I need someone's response by
| end-of-week on some topic, I need to do my heavy-chasing on
| Thursdays or I'm not going to get it.
|
| This is very different from pre-WFH where I could physically
| find the person on Friday and stand there until they did
| whatever needed to be done.
|
| I'm also a huge proponent of our new WFH world, but even I
| notice and can admit this disappearance of Fridays.
| whateveracct wrote:
| My remote employers have - and continue to - effectively
| subsidized a lot of my personal ventures in the last decade.
|
| Personal projects (software and art), learning skills
| (programming, instruments, video editing), improving at video
| games and sports. Not to mention leisure. All done "on the
| clock." To be honest, maybe the majority of the 40hrs I get
| "paid" for is actually used for this instead of company output?
| [deleted]
| eat wrote:
| Just one guy's opinion, but to me it sounds like you're
| making intelligent, healthy, and entirely logical choices
| about your life and how you choose to spend your limited
| time.
| whateveracct wrote:
| absolutely - your consciousness is your most precious
| resource!
|
| the hardest part is the tension with the external guilt -
| but that is the point of the guilt after all
| m1el wrote:
| https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/productivity-2 Mystery solved
| by an comic author with economy degree :)
| spikefromspace wrote:
| My 2 cents (although a bit of a salty take): In my last 3 roles,
| rewards like promotions go to those who create their own personal
| brand and win the popularity contest. While sometimes that
| correlates with actual productivity but often does not. So often
| I see folks do the bare minimum in these work cultures which seem
| to be getting more prevalent.
| shtopointo wrote:
| This might be a very stupid question, but _how do they measure
| productivity for knowledge workers_?
|
| What does it mean that a software engineer is less productive? Or
| a stock trader? Or various other knowledge jobs?
| KingMachiavelli wrote:
| From the actual BLS report:
|
| > Labor productivity, or output per hour, is calculated by
| dividing an index of real output by an index of hours worked by
| all persons, including employees, proprietors, and unpaid family
| workers.
|
| This metric IMO seems to be sensitive to other macro indicators.
| The recent economic slow down means less real output while the
| tight labor market means the same or more nominal hours worked.
| The slowdown in any industry sensitive to interest rates means a
| lot of people talking and waiting on how to adapt but fewer
| projects and products developed and delivered.
| TEP_Kim_Il_Sung wrote:
| My paycheck only goes 1/4 or less of the way it went just 5 years
| ago. Maybe that's why.
| Kiro wrote:
| I mean, it's obviously WFH. You might be more productive working
| from home but most people aren't. Any productivity boost was due
| to the novelty of it all but disappeared once the honeymoon was
| over. My friends who had never worked a single day from home
| before the pandemic were ecstatic and felt really motivated.
| Nowadays, not so much.
| brink wrote:
| War, shortages, incompetent / corrupt government, bad behavior
| being incentivized while good behavior is being punished, and
| inability to trust people are all really discouraging. What am I
| working for?
| willio58 wrote:
| As technology develops, we need to work less. In 2050 I doubt
| we'll all be on a 40+ hour work week.
| qqqwerty wrote:
| I feel like supply chain issues are worth a mention here. The
| labor market has been super hot, and finding new employees is a
| chore. At the same time a number of sectors outputs have been
| rate limited by supply chain issues. Do you reduce shift work and
| lay off salaried staff while you wait for the supply chain to
| catch up, or do you use a combination of stimulus money, cheap
| debt, equity sales, etc... to bide your time until things are
| back to normal?
|
| In the last year or two, at the peak of the employment boom, the
| answer was almost certainly to bide your time. If and when the
| supply chain returned to normal, you would then be in a good
| position to restore output to meet demand. If you had laid off a
| bunch of folks, you would have found yourself scrambling to
| rehire in one of the worst employment markets (for employers) in
| history.
|
| However, with interest rates rising and a potential recession in
| the near term horizon, that equation might change. We could (and
| already) seeing more layoffs. I think after a year or two, we are
| going to start seeing productivity snap back as a result.
| smeagull wrote:
| Probably their terrible labour laws. You can only grind people
| down for so long.
| zaps wrote:
| Come on... we know why.
| lupire wrote:
| If my conpaby doubles staff at same pay, for internal whatever,
| but generates the same product, what happens to productivity?
|
| Now, what if instead my company hires some other external
| business, to perform the same function with the same people at
| the same price? What happens to productivity?
| RomanPushkin wrote:
| My guess it's a game against inflation. People understand they're
| getting paid less for their hard work, and not motivated enough
| to work harder every day. For comparison, I'm spending x1.5 more
| on groceries than 1 year ago. Some items even x2 more expensive,
| comparing to last year.
|
| Salaries aren't growing that fast.
|
| Personally, I love what do, and this fact didn't affect the
| ability to work. However, I can imagine some people can get
| seriously affected by that.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| While Groceries have been impacted by inflation, the big chains
| in the US have also been just raising prices as indicated by
| their increased profits recently:
| https://www.wcpo.com/money/local-business-news/kroger-profit...
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Profit margin would be the relevant metric, not profit. And
| as you can see, profit margin has not increased:
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/KR/kroger/profit-m.
| ..
|
| Of course, a business with sub 3% profit margins maintaining
| sub 3% profit margins is hardly news, but inciting anger for
| no reason does result in more clicks.
| richardknop wrote:
| Could be a factor at tech companies where lot of compensation
| is in a form of equity options. Especially smaller / medium
| sized tech companies have had their stocks go down by 50-80% in
| some cases. So now you're earning much less than you thought
| you did plus inflation is out of control further reducing your
| real income.
| ianai wrote:
| Yesterdays post about interest rates and expected returns seems
| related from an aggregate and opposite side of the market:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33394486
| stormbrew wrote:
| These things always really need a giant flashing neon note that
| "productivity" doesn't mean how much workers get done but how
| much money is made off of what workers get done. They're only
| loosely connected, and most productivity gains have come from
| workers having to "do less" to "make more".
| qeternity wrote:
| This is not how productivity is defined or measured.
| stormbrew wrote:
| I'm really curious how you think it's defined or measured
| then. I'm obviously abstracting a bit, but a lot of people in
| the replies here seem to think it's related to how much time
| you spend watching cat videos on company time and it's
| definitely not that.
| habnds wrote:
| from FRED: "The efficiency at which labor hours are utilized
| in producing output of goods and services, measured as output
| per hour of labor."
|
| The solow residual is technically total factor productivity
| but is generally accepted as labor productivity. it's just an
| accounting identity that is estimated along with GDP and
| other vaguely useful but not very accurate measurements like
| the unemployement numbers.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| Then perhaps you'd like to enlighten us?
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| Workforce productivity at the national level is typically
| defined by some measure of output, the amount of goods or
| services produced (typically GDP), over some measure of
| input, the number of hours worked/workforce participation.
| mcguire wrote:
| So, how much money is made off of how much workers work?
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| No, not at all: for example, you can be a non-profit and
| still contribute to GDP, since you're still creating
| economic activity. Heck, even what the _government_ does
| contributes to GDP, and that 's not making money for
| anyone.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| I think this is exactly what parent meant. "How much is
| made" doesn't strictly mean "profit" in terms of a for-
| profit institution. The net output of a non-profit is
| directed somewhere, either internal or external to the
| entity, and that can loosely be considered "making
| money", or at least in the sense I believe parent meant.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| GDP is denominated in dollars, so this seems to be a
| somewhat vacuous position - yes, that's how we measure
| economic activity, but it doesn't have to involve money
| changing hands.
|
| Productivity is based on the _value of the work done_ ,
| not any profitability assessment. The original post which
| set off this chain asserted it was about not _how much
| workers get done but how much money is made off of what
| workers get done_ ... which is unambiguously wrong.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| > The original post which set off this chain asserted it
| was about not how much workers get done but how much
| money is made off of what workers get done... which is
| unambiguously wrong
|
| I don't believe the difference is consequential here,
| since the originating point still holds even using your
| definition. I wouldn't say it's "wrong" so much as
| imprecise, as the way I interpreted the statement would
| encompass your more detailed description.
|
| It's like when I ask people "how much money" they make, I
| intend them to include non-cash compensation in the
| number (in dollar equivalent), and pretty much all do
| without additional prompting.
| stormbrew wrote:
| Yes. My point was that when people read these articles
| they think of a much more casual definition of
| productivity that has more to do with a sense of "getting
| things done," but the word is jargon for something that
| has little to do with that.
|
| I was playing loose with the jargon meaning for sure, but
| I'm pulling out to what articles in the Washington Post
| or other economics-focused media really care about: the
| impact to corporate bottom line.
| mcguire wrote:
| So, how much money changes hands off of how much workers
| work?
| boole1854 wrote:
| No, it's a measure of a weighted average _quantity of
| output_ of goods and services (not of money) compared
| with the quantity of labor input.
| mcguire wrote:
| "Quantity of output goods" is measured in dollars, as
| mediated by the current price, no?
| boole1854 wrote:
| Not in general, no. They do count the dollars, but they
| also measure the dollar-to-quantity ratios of various
| goods and services. The final productivity measure is
| based on these adjustments.
|
| So if the amount of money that is exchanging hands goes
| up but the amount of goods and services produced stays
| the same, then the measured productivity does _not_ go
| up.
|
| You may be thinking about how GDP is calculated,
| specifically regarding government employees. For this
| category of spending, the "quantity" measured for the
| dollars-to-quantity ratio is simply the number of
| government employees. So as long as the government is
| hiring more people, the money they spend on those people
| counts towards real GDP, regardless of what those people
| are doing.
|
| However, government spending is _not_ used in calculating
| productivity, which measures only certain parts of the
| private sector where it is possible to also measure
| output of goods and services instead of relying on
| measures like 'employee counting'.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| If this is a good faith question, you can answer it by
| reference to any good economics text; or even, you know,
| Wikipedia. But it feels like maybe it's not.
|
| Here's another example: you volunteer at a homeless
| shelter, where you serve food on a soup kitchen line. You
| have contributed to the GDP of the United States. By all
| means, feel free to fit this into your preferred
| framework.
| jasmer wrote:
| Yeah I don't think this is true. GDP is an economic
| measurement, not some kind of intrinsic thing.
|
| So you can make a beautiful thing for your home - not
| GDP. Make it and give it to someone - not GDP either.
|
| Pretty sure money has to change hands, or in the case of
| government, we measure it as $ spent.
| mcguire wrote:
| What I'm doing is putting how you describe productivity
| into the form from the original comment. And I'll stand
| by that last version: How much money changes hands off of
| how much workers work?
|
| The input to labor productivity is how many hours are
| worked, correct? And no one is measuring output in terms
| of the number of bowls of soup produced by homeless
| shelters; those are converted to dollars based on a
| current index price.
|
| So you have economic activity, how much money changes
| hands, compared to labor inputs, how much workers work.
| Simple?
| boole1854 wrote:
| > And no one is measuring output in terms of the number
| of bowls of soup produced by homeless shelters; those are
| converted to dollars based on a current index price.
|
| The Bureau of Labor Statistics does have multiple teams
| dedicated to documenting how price is related to quantity
| of output. They don't literally count bowls of soup at
| every homeless shelter, but they do document millions of
| price vs quantity measurements on a regular basis. This
| data is then used in the calculation of productivity.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| Your fundamental confusion is that you keep equating
| economic activity with "money changing hands", which is
| wrong.
| mcguire wrote:
| Ok, here's a question for you: back in ancient days, most
| women worked at home. Is taking care of your own children
| and your own household an economic activity as would
| count in GDP, for example? Is someone making a bowl of
| soup for their spouse different from someone making a
| bowl of soup at a homeless shelter?
|
| " _GDP measures the market value of the goods and
| services a nation produces. Unpaid work that people do
| for themselves and their families isn 't traded in the
| marketplace, so there are no transactions to track. ...
| The lack of reliable data influenced the decision to
| leave household production out of GDP in the
| internationally accepted guidelines for national
| accounting._" (https://www.bea.gov/help/faq/1297)
|
| "Economic activity" that does not equate to "money
| changing hands" in some form, isn't an "economic
| activity" that counts for GDP or productivity, right?
| mcguire wrote:
| Weird story: From the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, as-measured
| productivity significantly declined and then stayed at a lower
| level. This was during the initial few generations of
| technological impact on industry, including "just-in-time"
| inventory which kind of requires computerization. Yet, at this
| same time, "bosses and economists" were seen in public
| wondering if computers weren't a net negative on industrial
| production.
|
| In addition to being weirdly defined, productivity is, as the
| graph demonstrates, very unstable over the short term.
|
| If you want a longer version of the graph in the article, see
| "The 1990s Acceleration in Labor Productivity: Causes and
| Measurement" from 2006 (https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdo
| cs/publications/revie...), page 190 (10 of 22).
| moffkalast wrote:
| > "just-in-time" inventory
|
| That really was a net negative eventually. Covid managed to
| completely wreck the worldwide supply chains because of that
| idiotic approach. God forbid anyone keep any buffer in case
| anything happens.
| ryanwaggoner wrote:
| That there are downsides is not in dispute, but you've not
| shown that it's a net negative. Perhaps it is, perhaps the
| shortages we experienced because of a very unusual event
| like COVID outweigh all the day to day advantages of having
| little slack in the system. But you haven't shown that.
| mochomocha wrote:
| It's definitely not an idiotic approach, and companies do
| keep buffers. In the most advanced cases, probabilistic
| models are devised to estimate how big these buffers should
| be. Asking for companies to keep buffers for unpredictable
| "once in a century"-type events is unrealistic.
| [deleted]
| moffkalast wrote:
| Yeah that's the problem, those estimates are usually
| arounds zero it seems. I mean sure on paper it checks out
| to be most profitable and most of the time it also works
| in real life. But you end up with this rube goldberg
| supply chain machine that can't be stopped or you
| apparently end up with a cyclic dependency problem and
| you cannot restart your production.
|
| We build structures to take a one in a ten thousand year
| flood or earthquake, but it's too much to expect
| corporations to keep more than 2 weeks of stock? Sure.
| mcguire wrote:
| Efficiency argues for keeping those buffers as small as
| possible. In a series of "normal years", a business that
| keeps their inventory down to what they need in the
| "normal case" will be more efficient than one which keeps
| a larger inventory to handle more rare events. As a
| result, the former will out-compete the latter in the
| market. (Inventory, in this example, is just one
| "buffered" resource that needs to be managed correctly
| under differing circumstances.)
|
| Efficiency, past a point, is therefore the enemy of
| resiliency.
|
| Until that day that something bad happens.
|
| And then you have an issue where one business may be
| prepared for the bad event, but something downstream of
| it is not; they can produce all the widgets, but can't
| ship them anywhere for example.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Also, to some degree, in events like these _what_
| inventory is needed is not predictable, because humans
| are unpredictable and irrational at times.
|
| Panic buying of paper towels early on in the pandemic, as
| an example, was not predictable.
| blululu wrote:
| It's even stupider than that: it divides this figure by a
| largely fabricated estimate of how many hours people actually
| worked. This is a SWAG metric that is largely made up. The
| commentary is most likely irrelevant.
| [deleted]
| nine_zeros wrote:
| > "productivity" doesn't mean how much workers get done but how
| much money is made off of what workers get done
|
| This is so true. The amount of bureaucracy has actually
| increased. This makes every worker work more. But this
| bureaucracy is unproductive work, thus does not lead to a rise
| in income (for the company).
|
| E.g. my healthcare provider uses fax machines (yes that FAX) to
| communicate with insurance providers. Fax is asynchronous and
| without confirmation/tracking of work done. Often, the fax is
| sent but the other side simply files it in a random place or
| forgets to process the work. So, I (the patient) now needs to
| follow up for weeks with insurance and healthcare provider to
| check on the status of that FAX.
|
| This is unproductive work and yet, it is taking a toll on every
| individual involved in this process.
| mcguire wrote:
| But it increases GDP! Yay!
| astrange wrote:
| It doesn't increase GDP if they get less productive.
| gridspy wrote:
| Many things increase GDP without being good. For instance
| Oil spills increase GDP as suddenly a bunch more
| (cleanup) work is being done and paid for.
| mcguire wrote:
| There's an old joke about an "economic hero" being a
| wealthy man going through an ugly divorce while dying of
| cancer.
| lob_it wrote:
| Its simple. The healthy people moved away.
|
| Its obvious that much of the GDP is based on low aptitude/low
| skilled products and services (i call it fat juice and fat juice
| filtering, looking at buffetts investing advice). An unhealthy
| environment is not something to grow old with.
|
| In the states, we can see that the illegal migration dumping is
| caused by the unskilled labor needed to support archaic GDP
| numbers.
|
| As a technology native, I was too young to work when the H1-B
| economy started to spring up, but the linear from that is easy to
| see.
|
| And somewhat off-topic, it looks like with the UK's PM, we get to
| see more of the effects that infosys played on the economy.
|
| Businesses that outsourced gave away their whole business model
| is an easy conclusion, so now they all have lower quality/priced
| competition (obviously speculation, but plausible remains
| entertaining).
|
| Looking at Walmart, I could never understand why they left their
| workforce in servitude, without paving the way for a future. The
| irony that "merica'" is filled with products from a communist
| country still astounds. They have no prospects for the future and
| supplement incomes with foodstamps and welfare.
|
| Even quiet quitting is easy to decipher. Its an unhealthy
| environment.
|
| Its simple. The healthy people moved away.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| Maybe i'm too stupid to decipher your message entirely but the
| healthy people moved away? To where?
| lob_it wrote:
| Not to you, obviously. It was a reference to participation
| (the lack thereof)
|
| And I should have linked a source, but business outsourcing
| was more of referring to manufacturing in china and the
| counterfit goods. Software is obviously easier to hijack too.
|
| It is cool seeing the karma go up and down on this post. Its
| back to (1) :)
|
| A global forum is always fun :p
|
| Its simple. The healthy people moved away.
| togs wrote:
| This article doesn't do a good job of defining its basic terms to
| make its claims.
|
| They admit knowledge worker productivity if 'tricky' to measure,
| yet are somehow sure it has decreased drastically, with no link
| to evidence.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Going to speak for my organization only, but I know exactly why
| we have become less productive. And it isn't even a bad thing.
| It's security. We played loose and fast and took risks. We got
| lucky (as far as I know) and it never bit us, but it certainly
| bit adjacent organizations and mandates started coming down from
| higher up to no longer play fast and loose and to prioritize
| security.
|
| There is inherently a tradeoff here. Don't trust and verify takes
| longer than trust and don't verify.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Because burnout is pervasive?
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| > Since the pandemic started, "the link between hard work and
| reward has been broken" for many workers, Buber said, resulting
| in "curbed ambition."
|
| Over the course of my 10+ year programming career, I've seen this
| effect steadily increase. Promotions seem to come or not come
| regardless of how hard you work. Looking back at older books
| about the tech industry (and comics such as dilbert), it seems
| like this effect isn't new, but could be something that ebbs and
| flows over time.
|
| > Productivity tends to move in cycles of 10 to 20 years
|
| See this is what I mean. Perhaps there's a megatrend going on
| here. Promotions go to those who don't deserve it, so companies
| self-destruct in their own incompetence, and a new crop of
| companies rise up, promoting those who are actually productive,
| and they reign supreme for 10-20 years, before they too become
| bloated and start promoting under-performers (who look good on
| paper). And the cycle repeats itself.
| Ptchd wrote:
| Some people are sure why, they just dont listen to them...
| mejutoco wrote:
| This is a bit abstract, but I think this has to do with processes
| and liability.
|
| Whenever there is a problem people look for someone to blame.
|
| The easiest thing is to create a new process to avoid this in the
| future, and be protected against blame.
|
| If this proceeds unchecked, the process grows and grows until
| every little thing takes forever. The processes need to be pruned
| sometimes too, not just added onto.
| bparsons wrote:
| facebook
| raydiatian wrote:
| > no one knows why
|
| $7.25
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| My local Aldi is advertising $16.50/hr + benefits. Average rent
| for a 1BR in the general area is $1000-1200ish.
|
| As for me personally, I don't think I could be more productive
| if I tried. I finish work and then look to pick something up -
| are there isn't anything ready. If I try to make something
| ready, people want everything run past a committee to gain
| consensus. Twice in the past 6 months, I've spent 2 weeks
| developing a plan, running things past people, and then I come
| to a single question and the response is "hmm, you know, let's
| not work on this right now".
|
| This morning I was on an email chain in which one executive had
| committed us to paying $$$$ for some consultants to do
| something, and he wanted the CTO to do some checks to make sure
| our system could handle it. But what exactly? The CTO had no
| idea what he was asking for. They went back and forth, and I'm
| nearly positive that they were both acting in good faith, but
| for the life of them they couldn't communicate. And so a bunch
| of workers are going to sit around with nothing to do,
| collecting their paycheck.
|
| I've been doing this now for over 20 years, I'm fairly senior,
| and I deal with executive-level people a lot. I've never seen
| anything like what's going on, and it's totally unfair to blame
| this entirely on workers (they aren't blameless either, tbh).
| raydiatian wrote:
| I mean $7.25 is completely inaccurate, and that's my bad.
| What I really mean to say here is that it feels like the
| whole non-C-level part of the work force is disincentivized
| to try hard, because C-level pay is hyper-inflated. Workforce
| get stiffed on ownership of the companies they participate
| in. Completely.
|
| 1) the first start up I ever joined, I ended up owning 10% of
| the platform and grinding frequent 70+ hr work weeks. I
| desperately wanted to spread my wings and make suggestions
| (you know, career advancement type bullshit) but I was
| consistently treated like I had only been hired because there
| was a talent shortage, and that I was expected to follow
| orders and shut the fuck up. Execs sold the company 3 years
| later for $50M. I got $6,000 from the deal.
|
| 2) Amazon is a multi trillion dollar company, with huge
| talent sourcing issues. Why? Employees are grist for the
| mill. When I interviewed, beginning SE's were salary capped
| and offered a tops of $40k in stock options that vested over
| 4 years. Most devs don't last more than 2.
|
| These can't be unique stories. I'm of the opinion that money
| and control need a fierce decoupling. I'd give a shit about
| implementing big visions if I were treated like it matters
| that I care and if I were presented a fair stake in the
| company. Until then, I'm going to worry about pursuing my
| personal projects more often than not.
| chrismarlow9 wrote:
| It never trickled down, if anything it trickled up. Pretty
| obvious why in my opinion.
| yrgulation wrote:
| At least in tech, no one tell them its filling in all the jira
| nonsense and irrelevant agile ceremony.
| d--b wrote:
| I bet my shirt that the measure is flawed.
|
| I mean look at the chart showing the change in productivity. It's
| all over the place. Productivity is a cultural thing that doesn't
| suddenly jumps up and down.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > The productivity plunge is perplexing, because productivity
| took off to levels not seen in decades when the coronavirus
| pandemic forced an overnight switch to remote work, leading some
| economists to suggest that the pandemic might spark longer-term
| growth.
|
| We're talking about a 4% change? That's the "plunge"? When it
| spiked during the pandemic, they were ready to conclude that it
| would always be like that, forever and ever, if not continuing to
| grow higher and higher? Both these positions are ridiculous,
| given how small the differences in both cases are, and how
| squishy a measurement productivity is in the first place. "If
| these trends continue, nobody will be doing any work in twenty
| years, and we won't even be able to tell you about it because we
| won't be working either!!!"
| dcolkitt wrote:
| The very important context is that productivity sharply rose in
| 2020, in the middle of the Covid recession. The recent drop in
| productivity is mostly just a return to pre-pandemic baseline.
|
| The simplest explanation is probably just that the workers who
| were laid off during Covid were the least productive, and so
| average worker output went up, then fell as they re-entered the
| labor force. Or maybe even just there was some sort of abberation
| with how the complex statistic or productivity was calculated
| (e.g. inflation was actually here earlier than measured by CPI,
| and output was deflated incorrectly).
|
| Either way, this is much more likely a pandemic related
| disruption and return to normalcy, rather than an indication that
| anything fundamental is "broken"
| postalrat wrote:
| Did you even bother to click on the article before typing your
| opinion of what happened?
|
| Their chart shows we are far below any sort of pre-pandemic
| baseline.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| The chart only shows change, not the actual value. If you
| look at a chart of the values you'll see that it's true we've
| just returned to ~2019 values:
| https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/productivity
| moufestaphio wrote:
| Not OP, but your reply comes off as pretty rude, especially
| as I think its pretty off base.
|
| The chart is showing "annual percentage change in labor
| output", not "gross productivity" which I think supports the
| OPs point.
|
| If it went up 10% in 2020, and 6.3% in 2021 (or whatever the
| graph is showing), just because there is a -7.4% drop in 2022
| doesn't mean its "far below any pre-pandemic baseline".
|
| In fact it's probably ABOVE pre-pandemic levels, even with
| the drop. I can't be certain from graph.
| cashsterling wrote:
| it reads "annual percentage change in labor output"... which
| I take to mean "rate of change of per capita productivity"
| over time, not actual measured productivity.
|
| So that graph does not say we've dropped below pre-pandemic
| levels.... according to this report
| (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/prod2.nr0.htm): "Output and
| hours worked in the nonfarm business sector are now 3.1
| percent and 1.5 percent above their fourth-quarter 2019
| levels, respectively."
| nradov wrote:
| There is a similar effect in some countries with strict labor
| laws which make it difficult to fire employees. Unemployment
| rates end up being high, but productivity is also high because
| companies are only willing to hire the most productive workers
| and won't take a chance on anyone else.
| aeternum wrote:
| I'd argue it was also due to lack of alternative options for
| leisure time. When everyone was stuck at home there's only so
| much Netflix the avg person can watch. People likely spent some
| extra time on work because it was something to do.
|
| Now with everything reopened there are many more options.
| chasd00 wrote:
| hours worked went way down but dollars made stayed the same
| because of the handouts. The productivity metric had nowhere to
| go but up.
| fintechjock wrote:
| Maybe an even simpler explanation is that productively is
| roughly calculated as GDP / employed workers.
|
| Productivity almost always goes up in a recession, especially
| one accompanied with massive layoffs (like early COVID).
|
| Productivity is going down right now compared to 2020 because
| we are pretty much at full employment.
|
| These productivity measurements aren't really tracking
| individual productivity at all.
| svnt wrote:
| I'm not sure if this is your point, or just that it's
| population level, but there is certain to be lag in the
| measure. I.e. if I contribute $10B to GDP in Q3, and lay off
| 10% of the workforce, my productivity looks great, but a
| large portion of that contribution will stem from work done
| by a larger workforce in Q2, Q1, and before, perhaps well
| before.
|
| So the measurement during periods of recession or expansion
| will always be artificially elevated or suppressed.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Similar things happened during the Great Depression. Many
| things made in that era before the war are highly sought after
| since the craftsmen who had jobs at the time were often among
| the best in their field.
|
| Musical instruments from the 30's are legendary.
| jldugger wrote:
| Note that this is like, how every recession works -- we lay off
| people, and productivity spikes. The fact that we did the same
| thing during a government imposed recession shouldn't be
| surprising at all.
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| We need to urgently optimize Boomers and GenXers know-how
| transfer to millenials or we're toasted.
| ElfinTrousers wrote:
| They ask just about everyone you can think of in this article
| about what's up with the US worker. They even ask Larry Summers,
| even though the only thing Larry Summers has to teach us is how
| to fail upwards consistently. Of course, they don't think to ask
| a, you know, US worker about what's up with them.
| exabrial wrote:
| A couple of reasons I can see, just my opinion
|
| * My buddies in trade-based fields say they are working harder
| than ever, as their backlog has only increased in size
|
| * Less scrutiny when working from home, more fooling around, less
| work
|
| * Feeling that "grass is greener" elsewhere, therefore no longer
| being committed
|
| * Polling has shown that their ideal job for Gen-Z is being a CEO
| of a company, but few seem motivated to start their own business
| as those stats have been down. Clearly there's a gap in
| motivation or understanding
| notfromhere wrote:
| Business formation surged since the pandemic, but Gen Z is
| going to have a hard time with it because they'll be more broke
| than millennials
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| Only if they need a lot of capital.
|
| Everything else about starting a business is far, far easier
| than ever. Almost every state in the US has streamlined the
| business formation process, made it cheaper and faster, etc.
| sylens wrote:
| Except for the fact that you won't have healthcare
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| They have access to the same health insurance, it is just
| expensive, which goes back to needing capital.
|
| It is trivial to go to healthcare.gov and buy the same
| health insurance an employer subsidizes for employees.
| runnerup wrote:
| > It is trivial to go to healthcare.gov and buy the same
| health insurance an employer subsidizes for employees.
|
| This is so shockingly false in most states that I don't
| understand how you feel you have enough personal
| experience to state this so confidently.
|
| Neither California nor Texas have any PPO-style plans
| available on healthcare.gov. For all the public / self-
| employed plans, "Out-of-network" means "Pay for it
| yourself, this is not covered at all." That's a huge
| barrier to care when you need an urgent care and it's not
| clear which doctor at which urgent care might be covered.
|
| Additionally the rates aren't just different due to
| subsidy, but due to quality of the participant pool. Many
| large employers are self-insured / self-funded, and the
| insurance company just administrates the fund,
| reimbursements, etc. However, the unsubsidized rates
| (made known to us via COBRA) are still much, much lower
| than the healthcare.gov rates because the participants
| are generally healthy, wealthy, and young.
|
| When you buy healthcare.gov you get the shitty rates.
| This isn't just a difference of degree ... having a $100
| deductible vs. a $6,000 deductible, or a $1,000 OOP max
| vs. a $22,000 OOP max literally makes the difference
| whether I can get my gastrointestinal cancer kept in
| check every year or not. I can afford the COBRA premiums
| for that $1,000 OOP max, but I absolutely cannot afford
| the healthcare.gov plan with >$15,000 in premiums on top
| of the $22,000 OOP max that I'm guaranteed to hit every.
| single. year. to get the care I need.
|
| Anyone who is pro-business, pro-entrepreneur, should
| generally be for good public healthcare. This would
| relieve businesses of a LOT of administrative burden and
| overhead to let them focus on their core value
| proposition. It would also facilitate a lot of good
| startups by freeing people to go build something great. A
| lot of potential capital growth, innovation, and
| disruption is being wasted because the people who can do
| this are stuck in place.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| This is not my experience in NJ and WA. Both had PPO
| plans with wide networks (BCBS at least) available, and I
| have never had to worry about out of network providers.
|
| Everyone can find out the cost of their health insurance
| including employer subsidized in box 12 code DD of W-2.
| Mine have been very close to the healthcare.gov prices,
| which NJ conveniently lists here: https://www.state.nj.us
| /dobi/division_insurance/ihcseh/ihcra...
|
| Also, the individual maximum out of pocket maximum is
| much less than $22k:
|
| https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/out-of-pocket-
| maximum-li...
|
| >Anyone who is pro-business, pro-entrepreneur, should
| generally be for good public healthcare. This would
| relieve businesses of a LOT of administrative burden and
| overhead to let them focus on their core value
| proposition.
|
| The current situation where businesses get to silo
| wealthy, young, white collar workers into healthier pools
| of insureds, and the ability to purchase insurance with
| pre tax money rather than post tax for individuals whose
| employer does not subsidize is all beneficial to large
| employers. Which is how they like it.
|
| If the US is going to stick with insurance system, then
| at least everyone should be dumped on healthcare.gov and
| employers completely removed from the equation.
| exabrial wrote:
| 1. goto healthcare.gov
|
| 2. select a plan
|
| 3. pay for it
|
| 4. congrats, you now have healthcare.
| uni_rule wrote:
| Anecdotally, overall morale isn't great currently. I doubt that
| helps.
| bilsbie wrote:
| I'd say it's an incentive problem. Not many employees get extra
| pay if they're individually more productive.
| ScottBev wrote:
| Heavy push to go from WFH to in office in the last six months.
|
| Decrease in productivity in the last six months.
|
| It must be all the remote workers!
|
| Ignore the return to office push, inflation, burnout, and every
| other possible factor.
| trollerator23 wrote:
| It's the opposite. It's the working from home that's the
| problem.
| dathinab wrote:
| A small anecdote:
|
| During industrialization "extended" rests where added before they
| where required by labor protection because they increased
| productivity.
|
| Multiple experiments have shown that in some situations software
| companies can be nearly as productive with a 32h week then a 40h
| week.
|
| As far as I can tell the US has been moving in the opposite
| direction, dismantling or avoiding labor protection and sometimes
| outright forcing people to work multiple jobs.
|
| Similar having long term health issues you can't treat because
| you can't afford it isn't grate for productivity. One of the more
| successful (non-private) health insurances in Germany is also one
| which also covers comparatively many precautionary health
| checks/things. As it turns out making it easier for people to
| less likely get serious sick is cheaper in the long run.
|
| Add to this that a lot of IT systems where added but in my
| experience many of this IT systems are designed for middle/high
| level management to look nice, instead of being designed with and
| for the people which use them.
|
| Lastly add to it that the future prospects look not so grate for
| a lot of citizens (not just limited to the US) which kills
| motivation (positive motivations works in general better long
| term then threads).
|
| So I'm not surprised.
| wetpaws wrote:
| >washington post >bezos newspaper
|
| of course they would be concerned about productivity of all folks
| AntiRemoteWork wrote:
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| We're fucking exhausted and there's never an end to work (agile).
| That's probably part of it.
| cableshaft wrote:
| I like Agile in theory but you're totally right about there
| always being something else, no proper breaks, you fix or make
| several things and then two weeks from now you're doing the
| same thing again but a different feature or fix, pretty much no
| change in the pace of the routine, just go go go.
|
| At least when I worked in fast food, sure there'd be the
| nightly dinner rush, but that only lasted about two hours, then
| everything would quiet down and you'd get to take a breather,
| take your time, goof off with coworkers, put a movie in the VCR
| in the breakroom (it was a long time ago), etc.
|
| Usually I at least take it a little easy the day we finish a
| sprint, but I still have to 'report what I did yesterday' in
| the sprint meeting the day after, so I have to have done enough
| to have some progress to report the next day. And then it's off
| to the races again. It's fucking exhausting.
| coinbasetwwa wrote:
| Yes!!! Waterfall could solve this in many ways.
| baron816 wrote:
| Wouldn't labor productivity be impacted by really low
| unemployment and a low real minimum wage?
|
| That should mean lots of people who would not otherwise be part
| of the labor market are getting low wage/low productivity jobs.
| So in an aggregate measure dollars of output over hours worked,
| you're raising the numerator at slower rate than you're raising
| the denominator.
|
| Early in the pandemic, high wage white collar workers stayed home
| and kept their jobs. Low wage service workers were furloughed. ->
| labor productivity goes up. Service workers get hired again->
| labor productivity drops.
| grumple wrote:
| This headline is alarmist and the article itself is designed to
| manipulate people unfamiliar with the productivity metric or its
| recent movement. Note that the article and the graph are about
| the % change in productivity... which spiked sharply during the
| pandemic and has now returned to the growth line it was on prior.
|
| Here's the fed numbers: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB
|
| The productivity drop the OP is referring to is that little blip
| downwards at the end. Hell, here's the Fed asking a year ago if
| the pandemic boosted productivity:
| https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2021/07/has-the-pandemic-boo...
|
| Basically all the chatter in these comments are irrational
| speculation, based on a false premise, and flatly wrong.
| anm89 wrote:
| Lot's of people know why. Academia hasn't been able to find a way
| to frame it that is palatable.
|
| We live in a society where every single thing is a rent seeking
| and nobody believes in anything besides winning because
| everything of substance has been hollowed out.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Like everyone here I would also like to propose an explanation. I
| think it's because Mercury is in retrograde.
| thrilled2behere wrote:
| this is not the time the time to start a new love this is not
| the time the time to start a lease
| jjk166 wrote:
| 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://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/productivity
| ummonk wrote:
| Wow. Much needed context.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Shut up and work harder nerd.
| rory wrote:
| It serves the important function of giving journos an
| opportunity to interview business consultants about what CEOs
| think of their employees' poop breaks.
|
| Which, in generating lots of hate clicks, is a huge economic
| boost in terms of Nonfarm Business Sector Labor Productivity!
| topspin wrote:
| Always read the comments first.
| ausbah wrote:
| usually it's the other way around
| dfxm12 wrote:
| 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 kept
| up with either inflation or productivity, that corporations are
| engaging in profit inflation, that the fed is intentionally
| raising rates to wrest back some power from workers, and so on.
| ryanwaggoner wrote:
| Also the cries for returning to the office
| JJMcJ wrote:
| Yes, this is "proof" that remote work is less productive.
| spacemadness wrote:
| I guess it's helpful to own all the media when you need to
| spread your propaganda around.
| phone8675309 wrote:
| The Washington Post is Bezos's mouthpiece - lower worker
| productivity hurts his bottom line so we have to suffer through
| his paper complaining about it.
| Cupertino95014 wrote:
| When you look at this graph, it just screams "noisy number."
|
| In other words, "worker productivity" is a nonsense metric. It'd
| be more instructive to graph the variables that go into it, going
| deeper until you find something that makes some intuitive sense.
| jimcavel888 wrote:
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| "less productive" compared to when? Last year? Historically? Is
| this a return to the mean?
|
| Just a brief glance at the first chart in the article, and last
| year was a bigger increase (6%) than this year's decrease (4%),
| and 2020 had the largest increase ever (10%).
|
| I didn't even bother reading the rest of the article after seeing
| that.
| VLM wrote:
| For many years, for political reasons we'll never have another
| "great depression", and this has possibly now extended to
| reporting recessions.
|
| Its worth pointing out that the economic indicator of
| productivity is basically GDP divided by worker-years-equivalent
| worked. So if its double-plus ungoodthink to ever report a
| decline in GDP, we can still, for now, report a decline in
| productivity while also reporting unemployment remains mostly
| constant, as long as no one makes the connection and cancels them
| for reporting disinformation.
|
| Its not a "recession" of course, that would be badthink of the
| highest order, its just a mysterious decline in the productivity
| metric, and nobody can talk about why while remaining politically
| correct. Its a good demonstration of how effective censorship can
| be. Why, I hear times are so good, the party is increasing the
| chocolate ration.
| atlgator wrote:
| Merit is no longer rewarded at my firm. Why be more productive
| than you have to be?
| mattacular wrote:
| Look at any data comparing wage growth with productivity since
| the 60s and that should go a pretty long way to explaining it.
| paulpauper wrote:
| The supplied chart looks like noise. Maybe the supposed loss of
| productivity is cyclical. It does not seem too concerning, imho.
| hedora wrote:
| I'd be curious to know how long people have been in their current
| job vs. pre-pandemic. Many people are now returning to work, or
| finally getting around to switching to a new company. They need
| to be trained.
| vt85 wrote:
| m00x wrote:
| ITT: A bunch of people convinced they know why, with 1-2
| anecdotal datapoints, mostly their own experience.
|
| Come on people, be at least somewhat scientific.
| [deleted]
| kennend3 wrote:
| Perhaps people are at the point of revolt over the ever widening
| productivity vs pay gap?
|
| https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
|
| Productivity kept on climbing and wages stagnated post ~1980
|
| Time for the workers to reap some of that benefit.
| s1k3 wrote:
| I doubt it.
| pastacacioepepe wrote:
| It could also be a generalized disillusion in the system. I
| believe what pushed americans through for generations was the
| american dream. No american believed to be poor, they were all
| simply "future millionaires".
|
| But what if people realized that it was only a delusion, that
| it can never be that everyone is rich, because then who would
| do the dirty jobs? There is no social pyramid without a base,
| this system is litterally designed to have a class of poor
| people forced to do shitty jobs to survive.
|
| If you take away the hope of a wealthy future, there are no
| reasons left to slave away your life on a corporate ladder.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| consider that small business people had done their daily
| things for thirty years, not been chatting on the Internet;
| many of those local biz people relied on walk-in customers,
| and many of those local biz people are part of the Boomer
| generation. Those people paid their bills and participated in
| the general economy.
|
| At the same time, corporate outsourcing reached epic
| proportions, with the associated transfer of power in the HR
| and Exec realms.
| boole1854 wrote:
| > https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
|
| The history of that EPI report is useful to know. Early
| versions of it showed a large gap between rising productivity
| and stagnating employee compensation.
|
| Some critics then pointed out problems with the analysis [1].
| The report performed an apples-to-oranges comparison of
| productivity of (A) all non-farm workers adjusted over time
| with a (B) GDP deflator-based inflation index compared with the
| compensation of (A) a limited subset of employees adjusted over
| time with a (B) CPI-based inflation index. A more useful
| comparison would use the same inflation index for both data
| sets and would exclude from the productivity measure the
| workers that are also excluded from the compensation measure.
| When this is done, the growth in productivity and pay rise and
| nearly in lockstep, thus effectively refuting the majority of
| the point that the original report was trying to make.
|
| Since then, the EPI report has been updated to be more nuanced,
| which can be especially seen when one expands the 'click here
| for more...' sections. The new conclusion from the report is
| that productivity and compensation increases have been
| increasing primarily for a subset of workers while a broad
| subset of workers have not seen large productivity and
| compensation growth. This is true (as far as I can tell), but
| it's also a different story with different policy implications
| than the original story which implied diverging productivity
| and pay within the same set of workers.
|
| [1] https://www.heritage.org/jobs-and-labor/report/workers-
| compe...
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Productivity kept on climbing and wages stagnated post ~1980
|
| The growth of government sopped up the difference. Nothing the
| government does comes for free, and then there's all the
| additional costs of complying with regulations and doing all
| the paperwork.
| WalterBright wrote:
| For the people who don't like my post, where does all the
| money come from that funds the government? Nothing is free.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Please stop being the highlight of zero sum thinking.
|
| Let's make up a hypothetical example. The government says
| you have to install a safety rail and the amortized cost is
| $1 a year.
|
| You: OMG, this is going to cost $100 over the next century,
| a huge loss, I am destroyed.
|
| Reality: Johnny doesn't fall of the equipment being coming
| paralyzed (costing you an immediate $200 in lawsuit and
| payout fees) and is able to produce economic product over
| the next few decades bringing in $400 to the economy. Net
| win for everyone.
|
| That's where the money comes from. Or would you rather be
| like Russia where you have a giant potential economy that
| outputs less than Italy and doesn't give a damned about
| corruption and has terrible quality of living
| standards/longevity?
| WalterBright wrote:
| Here ya go (not a hypothetical example):
|
| https://slate.com/business/2022/10/san-francisco-toilet-
| mill...
|
| They beat out Seattle, that spent $250,000 on a portable
| toilet a few years ago.
|
| On my own street, the city water outfit installed a fire
| hydrant. It cost $10,000, including architectural
| drawings of the installation. When the crew came out to
| install the hydrant (the main water line runs under my
| property) I asked them if they'd seen the drawings. They
| said "what drawings?" They'd never seen nor talked to the
| engineer, nor had any idea there ever was one. I asked
| them what the hydrant cost. They said $2,000. They had a
| machine on the back of the truck that was able to dig the
| hole, drill the main, and clamp on the new hydrant in 15
| minutes.
|
| This was 20 some years ago, back when $10,000 was real
| money.
|
| The IRS now requires any business that sends out payments
| to an individual of more than $600 per year now has to
| file 1099s. The threshold used to be $20,000. A lot of
| ebay-ers are in for a big surprise. Do you have receipts
| for what you paid for items you sold on ebay?
| pixl97 wrote:
| The guy installing the meter was told where to install
| it, they are not the architect that make sure it actually
| works if they install top many so it's not a surprise.
|
| It's no different than me 20 years ago installing a
| server for a client. I would go out slap it in and turn
| it on. I did not architect the applications on it, nor
| configure the firewall rules on the router for it to
| work.
|
| News articles are written about exceptional things, not
| the mundane.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Anecdotes about corruption and mismanagement do not
| address the underlying point that government spending is
| not zero-sum.
|
| That hydrant was probably too expensive (maybe;
| insufficient data to say for sure). The damage if a fire
| breaks out and no municipal fire system is available in a
| modern city is catastrophic.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Anecdotes
|
| I gave real examples, not hypotheticals.
|
| I never said government spending was zero-sum.
|
| > That hydrant was probably too expensive
|
| The bill was $10,000 for a $3,000 job.
|
| > The damage if a fire breaks out and no municipal fire
| system is available in a modern city is catastrophic.
|
| At $10,000 a pop there'll be a lot fewer hydrants
| installed, and hence greater risk of catastrophic fire.
| lambdaba wrote:
| Does that go hand in hand with the growth in administrative
| work? I would think so.
| [deleted]
| fazfq wrote:
| It's supply and demand - the supply of workers has doubled the
| last decades while demand has remained roughly the same. I
| think it's a miracle that salaries are so high currently.
| ianai wrote:
| This is actually contrary to Econ theory and empirical data.
| See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33394486
|
| The trend is towards less immigration and thus lower demand
| for goods/services and lower supply of labor.
| cma wrote:
| I think he is mainly talking about woman entering the
| workforce since 1970ish, which massively increased the
| labor pool.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| Assuming that's true--and I'm not sure it is--mass retirement
| of baby boomers, which has already begun due to forced
| retirement during the pandemic, is going to absolutely
| decimate the labour supply, which has enormous knock-on
| effects (including a rise in inflation).
| scruple wrote:
| You can go back to the year 2000 and find Fox News and CNN
| talking heads warning us about the impending doom of baby
| boomers retiring and taking the economy with them. Any year
| now...
|
| What has actually transpired in the meantime has been
| record breaking bailouts, corporate handouts, and profits,
| while workers pay remains in stagnation and housing market
| inflation goes through the roof (because of slow
| development, IMO, attributed to NIMBYism, mixed with a
| nationwide inability to build densely or build public
| transportation infrastructure).
|
| edit/ And let's not forget, there have also been 2
| disastrous, major wars, one of which inarguably never
| should have occurred.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| > You can go back to the year 2000 and find Fox News and
| CNN talking heads warning us about the impending doom of
| baby boomers retiring and taking the economy with them.
| Any year now...
|
| Yeah. And now it's happening.
|
| Back in 2000 the average baby boomer was 35-55, far from
| retirement age.
|
| The average baby boomer is now 55-75, and after COVID
| forced a ton of them out of the labour force, they're
| choosing not to come back.
|
| See, you can report about a thing that's likely to happen
| in the future before it actually happens, and in the
| intervening period, while it may not be happening, that
| doesn't mean the reporting is wrong.
|
| Or are you also one of those types that thinks the media
| was overblowing the whole global warming thing because
| they deigned to report about it before we saw some of the
| more dramatic and visible effects?
|
| Frankly, I don't know what you're going on about in the
| rest of your comment. I made no claim that baby boomers
| aging out of the workforce explains All The Things. I
| certainly didn't make the claim that it explains trends
| in the economy up to this point. My point is that it's
| now a major factor in the economy going forward and we
| can expect major changes as a consequence.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Any year now started in 2020.
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/11/04/amid-
| the-pa...
| [deleted]
| teawrecks wrote:
| ...and yet everyone is sure why.
| nostrademons wrote:
| This could easily be an accounting anomaly. Productivity is
| defined as real GDP / hours worked. If you shrink the denominator
| - say, by causing 25% unemployment with lockdowns - while also
| boosting the numerator with government spending, you get high
| productivity, which we had during the pandemic. If you then
| shrink the numerator (say, with high inflation, which translates
| a given nominal GDP to a smaller real GDP) while increasing the
| denominator (through record low unemployment), productivity will
| drop.
|
| IMHO traditional economic metrics are not well adjusted to an
| economy where output is largely independent of effort or hours
| worked, particularly not when measured on a quarterly basis. I
| work for a (remarkably slow and bloated) tech company. If I
| choose to do nothing other than post on Hacker News, that will
| not become apparent in company performance for ~2 years, because
| that's the median time for a project to make it out to market and
| start having an effect on consumer behavior. The company could
| lay me off and it wouldn't affect the bottom line at all, but
| it'd boost productivity. Conversely, if I hire a new person, I
| don't see significant gains in output for ~2 years, but
| employment and hours worked has gone up, and so productivity is
| down.
|
| The limiting case for this is algorithmic cryptocurrency trading
| with mark-to-market accounting (of which there was plenty in
| 2021). Here, you have computers trading virtual assets back and
| forth at ever increasing prices. Because prices are going up, the
| value of everyone's assets increases, and with mark-to-market
| accounting you'd show a profit. And yet _nobody is employed and
| no real work is being done_. Productivity is effectively
| infinite, but it means nothing.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Per-capita wealth probably a more accurate, better indicator of
| how well the economy is doing compared to productivity.
| pipingdog wrote:
| Without understanding precisely what is being measured, it is
| useless to try to understand why the metric is moving in whatever
| direction it is moving. This is hand-wringing and trying to blame
| the workforce for a collapsing bubble.
| pydry wrote:
| Weird that energy / natural resource costs werent mentioned given
| the way that productivity is calculated.
| onetokeoverthe wrote:
| [deleted]
| bm3719 wrote:
| In addition to the other good reasons listed here: Inflation.
|
| Most of us are now paid less in real terms for our efforts than
| we were 1-2 years ago. If you convert your labor to something
| invariant, like carrots, you just aren't given as many for a day
| of hard work. So, to the degree that we are rational beings and
| have agency on the matter, we scale our output accordingly.
| dml2135 wrote:
| Does anyone know how productivity for knowledge workers is
| actually measured? The article only goes so far as to mention
| that measuring productivity is "particularly tricky", but what
| datapoints exactly are these statistics even pulling from?
| stormbrew wrote:
| The economic concept of productivity has nothing to do with
| anything you can measure about a single employee (or kind of
| employee), the article is just conflating two very different
| meanings of the same word.
|
| In aggregate you measure it based on how much the company
| spends vs how much it makes off sold product. It's a measure of
| the efficiency of the company to its holders of capital.
| dml2135 wrote:
| Oh, that's very interesting. Can you get more specific?
| What's the difference between productivity in this sense
| then, vs profit margin?
| stormbrew wrote:
| I'm abstracting a bit more than I should really, because
| yeah the way I put it comes off as too close to just
| profit.
|
| But there are a bunch of ways to measure it, that generally
| comes down to some comparison of inputs vs outputs and
| those inputs and outputs have to be measurable in some way
| in aggregate.
|
| If you Google for "economic productivity" or "labor
| productivity" you can find better explanations of the
| details than I'm likely to give.
| blululu wrote:
| Wittgenstein's ruler comes to mind: what is 'productivity'
| measuring?
|
| A quick glance at the chart in the article suggests that the
| variance of this metric is huge. It is more or less a white noise
| source with a small DC offset. Given the formula the BLS uses, I
| would be hard pressed to calculate my own productivity (outside
| of lawyers and people working on assembly lines or at fast food
| establishments most people do not keep track of their hours). If
| I can't measure my own 'productivity' then I have no idea how the
| hell the BLS is going to do it.
| shtopointo wrote:
| I was wondering the same thing -- how could one measure my
| productivity? (as a software engineer)
|
| The best connection I could think of is something related to
| the company output, but in a market downturn I could be working
| 12 hour days, and the company would still be doing worse...
| anotherrandom wrote:
| The more you measure productivity, the less productivity there
| will be. Employees spend a good amount of time documenting their
| productivity for nonsense like performance reviews, and that is a
| lot of time that could have been spent doing actual work
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Productivity is like pornography, we know it exists but there is
| no single definition or measurement of it. But people treat it
| like a bank balance...
| bushbaba wrote:
| Could the shift to hybrid/WFH be attributed?
| [deleted]
| osipov wrote:
| pnemonic wrote:
| >>no one is sure why
| HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| twotwotwo wrote:
| So, the economic value measured for a piece of code drops if
| fewer people buy the product that it's in or its price has to be
| cut, entirely separate from how fast anyone is coding. Similar
| logic applies to a lot of sectors, not just software.
| Macroeconomic changes are going to work their way back to these
| stats eventually, independent of any changes in how workers spend
| their day or the concrete stuff they produce. (Kind of like
| stormbrew and nostrademons said!)
| naikrovek wrote:
| if I had to guess, I might guess that it's because large (and
| even a lot of small) employers put profit above all else,
| including employee compensation. for a while, employees observed
| themselves working hard for zero benefit, so they simply slowed
| down. not everyone can just pick up and move to another job that
| treats them better.
|
| if I had another guess, and I pulled from my experience as a
| software developer, I would say that the desire to have
| continuous productivity from all employees has created
| environments which throttle talented employees and asphyxiate
| those who are learning because they can't contribute immediately.
|
| I see this all the time in my own life. I can contribute a great
| deal if I am left alone to do work that I see needs done, and I
| have demonstrated this multiple times. but if you don't
| understand this about me and you want daily stand-ups where I
| explain what I am doing, all I get is challenge from everyone on
| the call. "why are you doing that? we want you providing value.
| you should pair more." I promise, and I have delivered
| previously, that if you just leave me alone I can do great
| things, but when every last person on a call gets a say in what I
| work on, you render me completely ineffective, and that's where I
| am now. this is a direct consequence of technical leaders having
| MBAs and no understanding of people or the work they are doing.
| covidiot5 wrote:
| krisroadruck wrote:
| Costs went up like 20-30% but we didn't give out 20-30% raises.
| Perhaps workers are leveling their productivity to the purchasing
| power of their salary?
| sylens wrote:
| Perhaps people have had to expend more energy just keeping their
| personal life together in the last few years. People with
| children have had to deal with the constant school closings,
| childcare facility closings, etc. and that has taken its toll.
| They may have family members who got Covid or had treatment for
| other ailments delayed by the pandemic's rush to treat Covid
| patients. They could've experienced a huge shift in the switch to
| remote working in 2020, and are now expected to make another huge
| shift back to in-office working.
|
| This doesn't even account for the incredible decline in civility
| from customers if you work a customer-facing job. The slightest
| inconvenience or mistake can end up in a tantrum by an American
| adult that only sometimes gets captured on video. And in the
| meantime, a bunch of people walk around opining that "Nobody
| wants to work anymore" as if they deserve to be waited on hand
| and foot regardless of circumstance.
| slowhand09 wrote:
| Lets not discount the people who populate the reddit/r/antiwork
| forum. Noting like wasting oxygen the rest of the world needs.
| weberer wrote:
| I never heard about them until I saw that news interview.
| What a wild ride.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yUMIFYBMnc
| kennend3 wrote:
| antiwork started off good but quickly went downhill.
|
| I abandoned it some time ago because it is now a "pro-union
| eco-chamber".
|
| I once advocated serious changes to the labour laws are
| what is needed, and was inundated with "join a union"
| posts.
|
| It really speaks to just how out-of-touch these people are.
|
| Unions only care about large corporations because they can
| get a lot of members and union dues. The issue with this
| logic is that small businesses are often totally out of the
| unions reach and laws benefit EVERYONE. The other issue
| they overlook is Union contracts only apply to those in the
| union and can change greatly from one union to the next.
| the_only_law wrote:
| I just don't get why you wouldn't choose someone a
| little... brighter to represent you.
| enragedcacti wrote:
| IIRC most users and moderators or /r/antiwork were
| opposed to anyone doing interviews on behalf of them. The
| person who did just unilaterally decided to do it anyway.
| kennend3 wrote:
| I did not take a position on unions one way or the other
| on my post there.
|
| As i said, i just found it shocking that "join a union"
| was their only response.
|
| Labour laws impact everyone, union contracts don't.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| lupire wrote:
| Unions have bloc power to influence laws.
| reitanqild wrote:
| I'm not unionized (I cannot because none of them are
| purely work focused here and I deeply disagree with their
| other views), but here is an observation from Norway, 20
| years ago:
|
| AFAIK, unionized companies in Norway statistically were
| more profitable than ununionized ones.
|
| This might of course be because it is more tempting to
| unionize when there is a lot of money to be had, but I
| remember one extra detail:
|
| In between (friendly) ribbing I also remember the union
| people here being focused on working efficient so that
| our bonus would increase :-)
| hooverd wrote:
| Nobody wants to work anymore, am I right?
| highwaylights wrote:
| "Expected to make another huge shift back to in office working"
|
| Well, you kids have fun.
|
| _sound of me closing the door in my pyjamas with a nice hot
| coffee in my other hand_
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Yes. I will WFH just for the perk of having good coffee!
| animal_spirits wrote:
| throwaway743 wrote:
| Nobody asked you to make a dickhead remark
| ep103 wrote:
| During Covid, people were hiding in their homes, quarantined,
| with nothing to do but work.
|
| This year, companies expect workers to return to office,
| despite little change in conditions, except now we have to deal
| with all of the above issues you've just mentioned, AND the
| fact that employees have now proven they can work remotely
| perfectly well.
|
| It should neither be surprising that in a system where
| healthcare is tied to employment, that productivity jumped
| while people were locking themselves in their houses from a
| plague, or that productivity dropped afterwards, or that it
| might drop given the complete callousness of our current
| system.
| lupire wrote:
| HN aside, most people don't have jobs that you can do more of
| at home than at the office / factory / lab / school. Heck,
| with school it's quite obvious that "teaching hours
| delivered" sustained during pandemic, but "education learned"
| dropped by probably half.
| cestith wrote:
| All of what you've both said, plus the number of people who
| thought or still think COVID-19 is "no big deal" who now have
| a pulmonary deficiency and long-term mental fog.
| baxtr wrote:
| The difficult part of it is: for some people it is
| literally nothing. We had it now for the fourth time since
| 2020 even though we're properly vaccinated and careful as
| much as life permits.
|
| It's a bit worse than a cold but much better for than the
| flu. So, yes, for us life just goes on with COVID. No need
| to change anything.
| autoexec wrote:
| 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...
| AnthonBerg wrote:
| There are many, many scientists who are attempting to
| warn us that _isn't_ nothing. The literature is piling
| up.
|
| Paper: _Immunological dysfunction persists for 8 months
| following initial mild-to-moderate SARS-CoV-2 infection_
| - https://doi.org/10.1038/s41590-021-01113-x
|
| Paper: _"Excess risk for acute myocardial infarction
| mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic"_ --
| https://doi.org/10.1002/jmv.28187
|
| Paper: _"p53 /NF-kB Balance in SARS-CoV-2 Infection: From
| OMICs, Genomics and Pharmacogenomics Insights to Tailored
| Therapeutic Perspectives (COVIDomics)"_ --
| https://doi.org/10.3389/fphar.2022.871583
|
| SARS-CoV-2 directly and indirectly interferes with p53
| expression and balance.
|
| On p53: _"p53, cellular tumor antigen p53 (UniProt name);
| p53 proteins are crucial in vertebrates, where they
| prevent cancer formation. As such, p53 has been described
| as "the guardian of the genome" because of its role in
| conserving stability by preventing genome mutation. Hence
| TP53 is classified as a tumor suppressor gene."_ --
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P53
|
| The literature goes on and on and on. People _really are
| not okay_ after contracting this virus. I know plenty of
| people who simply are not recovering after COVID illness.
| Friends. Close family. Kids.
|
| We are being warned.
|
| And crucially: We can clean this crap out of the air.
| Nobody has to breathe in SARS-CoV-2. We absolutely must
| demand that something is done. There's lots and lots that
| can be done.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| All of these seem to say the risks of complications are
| extremely rare? I mean it's endemic at this point so it's
| really really shitty if you are one of the unlucky few
| but what can we even do?
|
| > We can clean this crap out of the air. Nobody has to
| breathe in SARS-CoV-2.
|
| ?? What do you even mean. Maybe if the vaccine prevented
| spreading the virus we could but until we develop that I
| don't see how that is possible.
| krater23 wrote:
| I would not wonder if you throw so much research time to
| a normal flu you will find similar things.
| [deleted]
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| I mean it's such a small percent do you really think it
| would show up in national data?
| hezralig wrote:
| What is such a small percent and where are you getting
| your data?
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| "Long COVID" and medical journals.... Even the highest
| estimates only have it as a very small percentage of
| symptomatic patients which is already a subset of the
| general population.
| krater23 wrote:
| I everytime sayd it's not a big deal. Got my vaccine as it
| was ready but don't done anything else to don't get it. Now
| it's 2022, never had COVID, or maybee I don't noticed it.
| So, yes, not a big deal for me.
| AnthonBerg wrote:
| Indeed.
|
| In support of this--part of it!--here's one paper of many:
| "The Neurobiology of Long COVID" by M. Monje,
| neurobiologist at Stanford, and A. Iwasaki, immunologist at
| Yale.
|
| https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2022.10.006
|
| People with _measurable neurobiological issues will show a
| measurable productivity drop_.
| acdha wrote:
| I think you're really on the right track with caregiving, and
| would add the blind push to force people back into offices
| without any recognition of the costs of those policies (or,
| often, perceptible benefits). Going into the office is fairly
| expensive in any case but it especially pushes parents towards
| needing daycare and aftercare services which were already
| expensive before the pandemic and became more so after a non-
| trivial number of providers found other jobs, became too sick
| to work, died, or decided the health risk wasn't worth it after
| seeing that happen to other people. Our local parents group has
| had stories about people choosing not to go back to
| professional jobs because the employers insisting on RTO
| weren't paying enough to make up for that, especially if they
| weren't accommodating when someone's schedule is disrupted.
| D13Fd wrote:
| You're right about daycare/school closings. Even now,
| essentially post-covid, if our two-year-old gets COVID, that's
| a _10-day quarantine_ from daycare.
|
| That's 10 days where one of the parents has to work from home
| and be horribly unproductive because they are watching a child
| at the same time. And you can get COVID repeatedly. It often
| from the daycare itself, but also from a sibling who is in
| school. Even with full, boosted vaccinations, they can still
| catch it. They don't get very sick, but they have to
| quarantine.
|
| It's unsustainable.
|
| I'm sure that's not the only cause, but it's definitely a
| factor.
| bluedino wrote:
| Between pinkeye, RSV, influenza, hand foot and mouth, it's
| just one more thing your kids can get at daycare.
| sylens wrote:
| Not only that, but sometimes even the threat of an outbreak
| can hamper the availability of childcare. Last winter, a few
| staff members were exposed to a close contact, so they held
| them out of work as a precaution - but that resulted in one
| of the rooms having to close for a week.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I assume the parents and staff at my daycare just have a
| collective unspoken agreement to not test for covid.
|
| The remaining Covid policies are stupidly inconsistent
| anyway.
|
| RSV is far more dangerous to children, but that is allowed
| to go unchecked. Hell, you have to pay $250+ just to get
| tested for it.
| Rhinovirus/influenza/norovirus/rotavirus/other
| coronaviruses are all OK, with kids leaking from both
| nostrils in the classroom.
|
| But one kid or adult gets Covid and things have to close?
| Covid tests are paid for by government, but testing for all
| the other viruses costs hundreds of dollars? What a farce.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| > Covid tests are paid for by government, but testing for
| all the other viruses costs hundreds of dollars? What a
| farce.
|
| Could you imagine if there was some test that showed you
| all the viruses that are circulating in your system at
| any given moment? If we applied the same rules as we do
| for covid to such a test, people would literally never be
| able to leave their house...
| [deleted]
| nradov wrote:
| This is exactly why many people intentionally avoid testing
| themselves or their children. If you don't have a positive
| test then officially you don't have COVID-19 and can continue
| your normal life (symptoms permitting). (I'm not claiming
| that this is a good practice necessarily but it's what most
| parents do.)
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| They could do home tests though. But PCR would be "on the
| record"
| n65463f23_4 wrote:
| sounds like washington state lol. one of the reasons we moved
| from there.
|
| now at my kids preschool, if a kid gets sick they stay home,
| if they are better the next day they come back. no PCR tests,
| no missing 2 weeks if any member of the family was sick, its
| great
| [deleted]
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| >This doesn't even account for the incredible decline in
| civility from customers if you work a customer-facing job.
|
| Not sure if you're in a customer facing job, but I've
| personally noticed that there seem to be noticeably fewer
| Karens now compared to pre-pandemic levels. (There was a spike
| during the first lockdown, but that died down within a few
| months.)
|
| Everyone seems to be used to random disruptions now, and I
| think all of the campaigns about retail worker abuse have
| really made customers stop and think.
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