[HN Gopher] Where has all the productivity gone?
___________________________________________________________________
Where has all the productivity gone?
Author : wellpast
Score : 102 points
Date : 2021-07-31 13:04 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.johndcook.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.johndcook.com)
| guilhas wrote:
| We are at a time where trust is low. People want something govs
| and companies want something else. Left and right completely
| entrenched. While we keep fighting each other we waste a lot of
| time. Because things are changing to fast, so everyone keeps
| reinventing the wheel
| nixpulvis wrote:
| I'd say there's a Great Desynchronization.
|
| Not only are more and more producers simply out to enrich
| themselves, but social conditions make workers more and more
| likely to be at each other over topics unrelated to their work.
| It plays out like destructive interference in phase, where a
| massive amplitude in effort is taken on all accounts, but the sum
| is 0.
| skohan wrote:
| > The Great Dissipation.
|
| Yeah I was consulting for about 5 years and this is something I
| saw inside a lot of companies, especially when they get sizable
| funding: they become simultaneously obsessed with hiring and
| process, and very little real work gets done.
|
| To be honest, I think it might be an inevitability of the
| productivity boom. Thanks to technology and automation, it's
| possible for a single individual to accomplish what it might have
| taken dozens or hundreds of people to do a generation or so ago.
|
| When it becomes possible for for a small subset of the population
| to create enough value to support essentially everyone else, it
| it just changes the parameters of the social game we are all
| playing. When essentially all the manpower is needed to progress
| society, the optimal strategy is to reward the most productive
| individuals to incentivize others to increase their own
| productivity. When there's an excess of productivity, the optimal
| strategy may be to put yourself in a position to capture the
| value of those few productive individuals.
|
| But I think it's also something we can try to address via IP law.
| Currently we don't do a very good job of incetivizing creating
| something new. The current state of patent law essentially serves
| to bully small players out of the market who cannot afford to
| defend against dubious patent claims. Copyright is used as a
| cudgel to keep small creators from iterating on culture. In a lot
| of ways, it's fair to see the game as rigged, and to come to the
| conclusion that it's not really worth it to create something new.
|
| If you ask me, the single best thing we could do to improve
| productivity would be to make it easier for people to own the
| products of their creativity.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > this is something I saw inside a lot of companies, especially
| when they get sizable funding: they become simultaneously
| obsessed with hiring and process
|
| A lot of it just seems to be driven by strange attempts at
| optimization. For example, at my company, there was a lot of
| time spent on figuring out developer metrics (for all four of
| us on the team at its peak) and cost accountability.
|
| On the cost accountability side, one thing that has happened
| three times is that the developers have been idled so the
| project will not go over budget in time tracking. We were still
| paid. We were still at work. But to keep an internal budget on
| track, we were told to drop our tools and sit there.
| skohan wrote:
| Yeah this also sounds like part of the "MBA-ification" of
| business.
|
| I think a lot of this comes from a reasonable goal to have:
| if can find appropriate metrics which represent the work your
| company is doing, this should give you a reasonably objective
| way of measuring how different interventions move you closer
| to or farther from your goal.
|
| But I think the problem is that actually finding and
| implementing those metrics is a bit of a pipe dream in most
| cases. A lot of these metrics which people come up with to
| try to measure productivity - story points, ticket flow,
| time-on-task - are all fairly subjective, and not very good
| proxies for measuring actual value creation.
|
| I think it gets worse in orgs where there's a disconnect
| between management and the workforce which is actually
| getting things done. Often times, upper management _only_ has
| these artificial metrics to evaluate the performance of a
| team. A lot of company cultures put management in a bit of a
| bubble, so middle managers have more of a focus on
| conversations with other people in that management layer, who
| are metrics focused, rather than dealing with development
| teams, who are actually engaged with the product.
|
| As a result, the "ground truth" for management becomes the
| metrics, and you start to see really silly things happen
| because the metrics matter more than the product.
| knightofmars wrote:
| I witnessed what you are describing first-hand. Some years
| ago, in a job far away, the overall account manager for my
| region managed everything through a single budget
| spreadsheet. Decisions were made entirely based on cost
| without any actual thought to the outcome of the decision.
| While in the middle of cutting cost, the company failed to
| deliver some important contracts that led to the company
| being penalized (to the tune of tens of millions of
| dollars). The irony, if they'd just spent a fraction of the
| penalty amount hiring people, they would have been able to
| deliver on the contracts and avoided the penalty.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| You Can't Improve What You Can't Measure Disease
|
| YCIWYCM is a great way to kill productivity and performance
| improvement efforts when taken too far. Sometimes, you've
| just got to go with your gut. The amount of effort needed
| to make measurements, especially for less tangible
| knowledge work, can _kill_ productivity overall.
|
| Often, the measurable parts are at the conclusion of a
| particular effort, the total time it took to get there and
| the value of the output. But it's not necessarily possible
| to meaningfully measure the internal process of reaching it
| when (again, knowledge work specific) half the time may be
| spent _thinking_ about the thing. How do you measure that?
| How do you indicate progress when you 're one "aha" moment
| away from success but can't force one to occur? Synthesis,
| what most programmers do, the combining of ideas to form a
| new theory [Naur1985] is hard to do mechanically. It can be
| done, for a lot of work, but not necessarily for
| everything. But because it's not a purely mechanical
| process (in contrast to a lot of other business processes
| or physical manufacturing work where you have _more_
| mechanical work and _less_ synthesis) it 's hard to
| identify useful metrics and collect them.
|
| When the work is more mechanical ("We've done this before,
| but...") then you can start finding more places to measure
| and gain useful insights. But the more novelty that occurs,
| the more you need to collaborate with each other or spend
| time in thought, the harder it is to find useful
| measurements.
|
| [Naur1985] https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf
| 127 wrote:
| It's indeed very notable that there's a lot of talk how to make
| people generate more value to others, and nothing about how
| people find ways to consume the value that others create.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| It went to:
|
| - distractions
|
| - the plethora of (min)information
|
| - the lack of proper books, guids and documentation
|
| - the twisted fact that everybody needs to be rich and famous
|
| - the constant chasing of revenue instead of science, art,
| philosophy
|
| We're living in a fake bubble of bullshit, and everybody wants to
| be the polished turd.
| boomka wrote:
| the article is a bit weird, I think it refers to productivity
| paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
|
| But it is a well studied topic, with much more than 5 possible
| explanations offered for it.
|
| I personally think the whole thing is a bit of a nothingburger
| that comes about as a simple consequence of how we measure
| productivity, which is via measuring how much money is paid to
| people. And since monetory / fiscal policy more or less ensures
| that all the people are always paid something for something,
| productivity growth is manifested as invention of new service
| industries, from personal trainers to dietologists. In other
| words, our productivity metrics mostly measure hours worked.
|
| Better metric would be how many hours worked it takes to produce
| a ton of nickel, or a bushel of corn, or a typical family car.
| And those number have been going down consistently, suggestive of
| strong productivity growth and no paradox.
| wussboy wrote:
| Do you have links or suggestions for stats about "hours worked
| per bushel of grain etc."? I'm interested in this area.
| boomka wrote:
| something like this: https://sdgdata.gov.uk/2-3-1/
|
| look at the table of labour productivity, it has been growing
| consistently and has almost tripled between 1973 and today
| fhssn1 wrote:
| 'Why aren't we far more productive?' sounds not too different
| from 'Why don't we have infinite growth on a finite planet?'
|
| - There is not enough meaningful democratizable work. Most work
| is either menial, or challenging. And I'm not even talking about
| the third kind of work [1].
|
| - Menial work is getting more and more automated.
|
| - Challenging work doesn't necessarily scale with human resources
| beyond a certain point (e.g., If 1000 researchers are already
| working on cancer, increasing the number to 10,000 isn't
| necessarily going to help find a cure faster).
|
| [1] https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Our processing speed is way up, but I believe our cost of
| energy has more or less not grown substantially.
|
| In fact, with proper economic cost accounting like
| externalities as we try to deal with global warming, costs are
| going up.
|
| Solar/wind are gradually starting to improve things in
| meaningful ways but they are a fundamentally different grid
| design.
|
| Perhaps a modular LFTR reactor design can beat what Solar/Wind
| will settle at on an EROEI measure once solar/wind are out of
| their main economies of scale and techonological development
| curves.
|
| But what we are entering for the next century is clearly one of
| resource limitations, and working much harder to more
| efficiently use them.
| failuser wrote:
| Why do you think that 10x increase in cancer researchers would
| not help find the cure faster? Do you think there is one
| supergenius destined to find the solution and he is already
| working on it? 10x researches can try out 10x approaches or
| concentrate of specific types of cancer. From what I
| understand, most of actual research is done by hungry grad
| students and the higher your position get the more time you
| spend of trying to keep or expand the funding. I know that
| keeping the grad students overworked and hungry keeps many
| grifters out of science, but at what cost?
| lostcolony wrote:
| '10x researches can try out 10x approaches'
|
| Can they though, and is that helpful? Is there sufficient
| communication between everyone in the field to ensure no one
| is investigating the same things? Is that still 10x, given
| the communication overhead in ensuring what you're wanting to
| start doing isn't already being worked on by one of the 9999
| others? Are their 10x as many approaches that can be
| investigated in parallel at all times?
|
| The lessons from the mythical man month still apply even with
| research.
| failuser wrote:
| Those are all general thoughts and results would be
| different for different problems. Some can be parallelized
| for millions of people, some can not be at all.
| Parallelization is as much about throughput as latency.
| Nine women can not gestate a child in one month, one can
| apparently gestate eight in nine months.
| fhssn1 wrote:
| The numbers 1000 and 10,000 are just to make a point. It
| could be 10,000 vs 100,000. I just don't know.
|
| I've added "beyond a certain point" to 10x. So e.g.,
| increasing from 10 to 100 helps. 100 to 1000 helps. 1000 to
| 10,000? maybe. 10,000 to 100,000? maybe not. And so on (like
| approaching diminishing returns). (again the numbers are for
| illustration, and would vary with the nature of work).
| wpasc wrote:
| IMO Joel Spolsky kind of covers a possible answer to your
| question in his blog post "Hitting the High Notes"[0]. While
| I'm sure there's plenty of counter examples, it's important
| to note a wide ranging variety of discoveries and
| breakthroughs that have come from individuals and small teams
| that have. In many of these cases, that person or small team
| is uniquely breaking against an otherwise agreed upon
| convention or state of the field.
|
| 1,000 people who agree on a paradigm which may be false is
| not helped by another 9,000 people who agree with that same
| paradigm. In the era of Einstein, how many physicists
| accepted the traditional view of space and time? throwing
| more physicists at the same problem probably doesn't mean
| getting more Einsteins.
|
| Potential example for today (though IANAD nor Biologists),
| how many scientists and researchers agree upon removing
| plaques as a treatment for alzheimers? how long has that
| theory been the dominant narrative in spite of failed
| treatments at removing plaques? how many individuals wanted
| to try/research something different but all the other grants
| went to people pursuing the held narrative because the
| grantors also held that same narrative?
|
| There's countless of companies where scaling up # of people
| just adds noise and bureaucracy and smaller companies with
| strong-minded individuals were able to break through.
|
| [0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/07/25/hitting-the-
| high-n...
| sprafa wrote:
| another way to look at it is that cargo cult thinking is
| the default mode for human thinking. This is something I've
| noticed recently and increasingly believe to be true. The
| vast majority of people do NOT take the time to build an
| opinion from weighing multiple sources of information,
| looking for counter arguments etc. Cargo cult is the
| default mode for a civilization.
| Frost1x wrote:
| I've worked in research most my career and I tend to agree.
| The issue is that throwing more people in the same narrow
| approach most likely won't help if that approach is off to
| begin with. It has been promising and we've been getting
| and still get some returns out of it, but is it possible
| we're stuck in a local minima of the solution space in
| terms of representing the real system were trying to
| understand and manipulate? We of course can't know and
| those who are captains of a discipline and the funding
| agencies that decide who gets funded and don't steer to
| focus on narrow incremental changes. Some of this has to do
| with deeper business management steeping into basic
| scientific research, where I believe, it doesn't belong
| because it thinks in the wrong time horizons and has the
| wrong goals.
|
| High risk, novel approaches often aren't funded or few
| opportunities exist for them. There is good reason for this
| because it can be abused by those just looking for fun or
| easy work while labeling it novel. It may also encourage
| fringe sciences that are bordering on psuedo-scientific
| work. They incorporate a bit of science but then go off in
| directions that are almost provably wrong. Distinguishing
| which novel approaches seem like genuinely novel realistic
| and non abusive proposals isn't always easy. In some cases
| they're just laughably wrong because there are so many
| assumptions baked in that are almost provably wrong or at
| least self inconsistent. On the other hand, some aren't
| quite so easy and involve a significant amount of effort
| and insight to understand exactly what's being proposed.
| This is often where paradigm shifting research really
| occurs.
|
| It can take incredibly brilliant scientists with enough
| creativity to see the opportunity in a proposal and approve
| it and those aren't the people often awarding proposals. On
| the flip side, most of these sort of proposals, no matter
| how valid and novel they may be, simply aren't going to be
| correct and the reviewer is right to take a more critical
| eye. The novel approaches are inherently high risk and most
| will be wrong. I still think we need to fund these
| approaches. I've been involved in proposals that seemed
| only _slightly_ novel in direction from accepted paradigms
| and reviewer responses came back (some agencies return
| anonymized responses) in a way that showed they clearly
| didn 't understand enough about the domain to even make the
| assessment when their critiques were clearly invalid, they
| just didn't agree with the proposal approach. Maybe they
| were right the overall approach was off and created a lame
| excuse, maybe they were wrong, but this tendency to be risk
| averse even in the few funding opportunities that were
| clearly budgeted to be high risk shows the culture we have
| in modern science.
|
| The burden of responsibility often lies on those proposing
| these huge shifts and we may be reaching points in some
| domains of human knowledge where the burden of proof is
| simply too high for an individual to provide for a given
| novel idea. Imagine if Peter Higgs alone had to provide
| evidence to his idea. It wasn't until so many other
| iteratative approaches were exhausted that particle physics
| decided they had to start testing novel other options. How
| much time, effort, even careers were wasted chasing other
| ideas? Should science be depth first search, breadth first
| search, a mixture of the two to try and hedge out bets that
| if we are on the wrong direction we might find a better
| paradigm in parallel we can jump to when we're stuck, or
| perhaps a different heuristic?
|
| Then the really really difficult question, for me: if we
| support a mixture model of say BFS, DFS (and perhaps a
| handful of others) for the search space of acquirable
| knowledge, who should decide resourcing allocations for the
| search mixture model? What is the best set of approaches
| and resourcing? Science already incorporates complex search
| mixture approaches for knowledge at various levels but it
| seems at the highest level (how we resource stuff) it
| doesn't, it's incredibly iterative, risk averse, and
| focused on short time horizons for returns on investment.
| failuser wrote:
| Resource allocation is another issue. But even if the other
| teams try to independently replicate results (imagine such
| luxury), that would be useful. The more people there are in
| the field the probability of challenging the status quo is
| higher. Also why scale up the number of companies? You can
| increase the number of startups trying something new.
| User23 wrote:
| Cancer really isn't one disease. It's thousands if not
| millions or maybe even billions of diseases that share some
| similarities. The odds of a silver bullet cure are
| effectively zero, but there's plenty of opportunity to help
| sufferers die with rather than of. It's a game of incremental
| improvement so it's likely that greater investment would
| produce reasonable returns.
| reader_mode wrote:
| >The odds of a silver bullet cure are effectively zero
|
| A way to kill a specific type of cells doesn't sound
| impossible (zero).
| [deleted]
| frankbreetz wrote:
| I think there are so only so many possible solutions, the
| first researcher will choose to researcher the possible
| solution with the highest probability or working. As you add
| more researchers they will research less probabil solutions.
| It is the law of diminishing returns.
| failuser wrote:
| Scientific research is not a high school problem where the
| clear algorithm is known. A lot of approaches need to tries
| before valid ones are found. And for cancer a single
| approach is most likely not enough.
| frankbreetz wrote:
| The grandparent talks about going from 1,000 to to
| 10,000, not a single researcher. Are you implying the law
| of diminishing returns doesn't apply to research?
| 3grdlurker wrote:
| If you have a team of programmers who always miss their
| deadlines, will increasing the headcount _necessarily_ make
| them a team that always meets the deadlines? No, because
| other than having more people means more distractions and
| need for communication, there might be other problems, such
| as technical debt, or miscommunicated requirements, or
| inexperience, or outright unreasonable demands.
|
| The only variable that increasing the headcount necessarily
| improves is the headcount itself.
| cercatrova wrote:
| No but increasing the number of teams who are all now
| competing with each other would probably allow us to see
| progress scaling with the number of teams, not necessarily
| putting everyone on the same team.
| 3grdlurker wrote:
| Science discoveries don't just happen because there are
| more people "competing" to solve a problem. The more
| likely outcome of what you're saying is that you'd only
| have more teams competing, sure, but to _redo_ each other
| 's work.
| username90 wrote:
| They don't even compete to solve the problem, they
| compete for funding. People who are better at politics
| gets more funding, so adding more people could even be
| net negative with them draining up all the funding from
| those who do the actual research.
| jollybean wrote:
| ? Productivity is to a great extent a measure of producer
| surplus.
|
| If you can sell something at a higher prices, often that leads to
| 'greater productivity' when really it isn't.
|
| So if consumers have more buying power, and we make the same
| amount and quality of stuff, but sell at lower prices, consumers
| are getting a better surplus i.e. 'consumer profit' ... then
| that's where productivity can 'disappear' to. Literally higher
| standard of living.
|
| If we measured in some objective price - or - we just measured in
| terms of 'quality of things produced' we'd see that better.
| breck wrote:
| 6) We've made laws that greatly restrict our abilities to use
| these magical new technologies in their most productive ways.
|
| Google Books was the canary in the coal mine. Remember when
| Google was going to organize all the world's information and make
| it accessible and useful? Then the copyright lobby attacked, and
| over a decade later that project (which is so _obviously_ a
| quantum leap in terms of what it could do for human productivity)
| remains on pause (or permanently abandoned? not sure).
|
| People today have access to an endless supply of information
| noise. If you want quality signal, it's still a trickle.
|
| All the best Internet ideas now are not getting built because of
| copyright law.
| egypturnash wrote:
| And the problem here is that writing a good book on a thing is
| something that takes _time_ and _effort_. Usually enough that
| it 's a full-time or part-time job.
|
| While I am no fan of the copyright maximalism that Disney and
| other corporations employing armies of people doing work-for-
| hire have turned copyright law into, I am also a person eking
| out a living as an artist, and I would like to be able to say
| "please don't use this thing I made to promote viewpoints
| inimical to my existence, please don't sell copies of this
| thing I made without asking my permission first and working out
| licensing terms", and even "please don't reproduce this thing
| at all without giving me some money". And I would also like to
| continue to make enough money off of my work for my bills to be
| paid. I've found that Patreon's enabling me to give a lot of
| stuff away, but if I wanted to make some of my work a scarce
| good, that's a choice I'd prefer to be able to enforce in the
| courts.
|
| Or perhaps more succinctly: if you want information to be free,
| you need to figure out how to free its gatherers, tenders, and
| creators from worrying about their bills.
|
| If you think you have a better idea for freeing information-
| creators from worrying about their finances than
| "Kickstarter/Patreon except XXX" or "put ads on all the
| things", then you might have a project worth chasing.
| robjan wrote:
| There is a huge assumption here that productivity isn't
| increasing, which is false. Economic output per hour worked has
| been steadily increasing in every country since their respective
| industrial revolutions.
|
| When you go to the source tweet, it turns out that it's comparing
| the developed world to the developing world. Developing economies
| will always grow faster, but not necessarily efficiently, because
| there's more low hanging fruit to pick. These low hanging fruit
| can be picked by throwing more people at the problem (increasing
| workforce participation or working longer hours).
|
| One example is how much more time it takes to build
| infrastructure in America vs China. If you look at the data[0],
| productivity in both countries is growing at roughly the same
| rate. It pretty much invalidates the assertion in the blog and
| the source tweet.
|
| [0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-
| ho...
| lkrubner wrote:
| Those are PPP numbers, which means they are a total joke. The
| graph you post does not show the post war boom, nor does it
| show the productivity stagnation after 1973. The USA went from
| 3% per year productivity growth, before 1973, to 1.5%
| productivity growth after 1973. None of that is visible in the
| chart because the chart is using PPP numbers.
|
| But, as a separate issue, the above essay is focused on
| computers, and so it implicitly raises the Solow Productivity
| Paradox: why don't computers seem to add anything to
| productivity?
|
| See:
|
| The Solow Productivity Paradox: What Do Computers Do to
| Productivity?
|
| https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-solow-productivity-pa...
|
| McKinsey wrote this in 2018, predicting a productivity boom was
| coming soon, though of course this prediction has been made
| often since 1973, and the only time it was even slightly true
| was during the boom in big box retail 1995-2005:
|
| https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital...
|
| It's well known that in the 1800s the telegraph and then the
| telephone allowed a large scale re-organization of capital, and
| capital invested heavily to take advantage of the new
| technologies, but it was impossible to see a productivity
| benefit. These technologies allowed new systems of control, but
| not necessarily any productivity benefit. Since 1970 computer
| network technologies have offered a similar reorganization, but
| they are vastly more powerful than the telephone, and they
| allowed a re-organization that was vastly more profound than
| any previous reorganization of capital. Millions of jobs were
| outsourced to India, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and then
| Brazil, Russia, Romania, etc.
| babesh wrote:
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-ho...
|
| Are you sure about that? Are you measuring in absolute GDP per
| person or rate of growth per person?
| fidesomnes wrote:
| As much as I dislike Chinas ruling party, their government is a
| model of efficiency when compared to the USA and it mostly gets
| out of peoples way. Contrast that with US government where
| taxes, vehicle registration, and judicial process is perhaps
| decades behind despite having more resources. There is
| something about complacency common to all democracies that
| never up well. The old refrain "at least Mussolini made the
| trains run on time" applies just as much today.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > These low hanging fruit can be picked by throwing more people
| at the problem (increasing workforce participation or working
| longer hours).
|
| I haven't read the article yet, but note increasing workforce
| participation or working hours doesn't increase productivity -
| that just increases the denominator for the productivity
| calculation, and unless it increases the numerator faster there
| is no productivity increase.
| robjan wrote:
| This is why I said "not necessarily efficiently". At a very
| macro level, you can increase economic output by either
| working more or increasing efficiency (productivity per
| hour).
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| GDP doesn't take into consideration public debt.
|
| If public debt is up 100% and GDP has barely changed - I don't
| think that's cause for celebration that GDP / hours worked = we
| are more productive.
|
| I'm not saying this is the case. But people use GDP a lot to
| make points like this - and it's important to talk about how
| much public debt is increasing GDP.
| skywal_l wrote:
| If you are in a country where pensions are managed by the
| state, your contributions are considered taxes. If you are in
| a country with a private pension system, your contributions
| are in the GDP!
|
| The GDP is not a scientific measure. It is an ideological
| concept.
|
| It doesn't mean it is useless, but it should not be taken at
| face value.
| karatinversion wrote:
| Taxed income isn't subtracted from income in national
| accounts though...?
| coldtea wrote:
| > _There is a huge assumption here that productivity isn 't
| increasing, which is false._
|
| Actually the assumption in the post is the exact opposite: that
| productivity has increased.
|
| The question it poses then is "so what do we have to show for
| it?".
| epicureanideal wrote:
| It might be that we're spending the increased productivity on
| temporary things rather than long-lived things. For example,
| spending $1M on keeping a retired cancer patient alive.
| That's good for them, good for their family, good for lots of
| people to feel like they'll have a chance of survival if they
| get it, but it doesn't cause a new bridge to be built, etc.
| The technology improves, the knowledge improves, but those
| things aren't visible on a skyline.
|
| It might also be things like higher quality food, varieties
| of food, yachts for the rich that most of us don't ever see,
| or things like that, things that are either consumed and
| don't accumulate wealth, or things that are relatively long
| lived and durable but not part of most people's lives because
| most of the gains have gone to the top 1%.
|
| Other ideas: paper pushing services like handling
| unnecessarily large volumes of litigation just to run a
| business, which requires work and causes GDP to go up but
| doesn't produce actual products.
| IkmoIkmo wrote:
| Cheap clothes, cheap flights, cheap music, movies, cheap
| food, longer life expectancy, bigger homes with smaller
| household sizes, cheap washing machines and various
| appliances, all with far fewer working hours, and far less
| household work while you're off-work.
|
| I'm definitely better off than my parents or grandparents.
| Hell, we have stories in our family where my uncles would
| shower at the communal bathhouse cause their home didn't have
| a bath nor hot water. Everyone used to wear hand-me-downs. We
| used to send cassette tapes to family abroad because
| international calls were so expensive. We flew every few
| years instead of multiple times a year. We saved up for CDs,
| and I literally never, ever went out for dinner to a
| restaurant (outside of a rare holiday) with my parents. My
| dad lost both parents as a child to old age, my grandfather
| worked 6, sometimes 7 days a week, my grandmother spent
| almost the entire day running the household (e.g. washing
| clothes by hand), they had no retirement and lived like that
| till death.
|
| I'm often surprised about this idea we've got it worse off.
| The conversations usually revolve around housing, healthcare
| and college having become drastically more expensive.
| (although, never normalised for interest rates that dropped
| from 15% to 3%, homes that average 2x larger than 60 years
| ago with fewer people, life expectancy increasing by a decade
| since 1950 etc etc). Life isn't better in all respects, but
| on the whole I certainly wouldn't want to trade with past
| generations. And a lot of that boils down to productivity
| allowing new measures of wealth for many.
|
| If we look at it on a worldwide scale, the difference is
| much, much more pronounced. Many lower income countries saw
| massive productivity improvements. We shouldn't forget that
| the past 3-4 decades have been all about globalising markets.
| Factory workers in the US now compete with those in China. IT
| staff the UK is competing with IT staff in India. Technology
| is relatively mobile and goes across borders easily. You
| cannot measure ceteris paribus productivity improvements in
| terms of gdp per capita in the west without correcting for
| increased competition abroad (e.g. in China). And in doing
| so, you will find that there's even bigger productivity
| increases in lower/middle income countries, too.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Cheap clothes, cheap flights, cheap music, movies, cheap
| food, longer life expectancy, bigger homes with smaller
| household sizes, cheap washing machines and various
| appliances, all with far fewer working hours, and far less
| household work while you 're off-work._
|
| So, not much then.
|
| For the consumer devices, cheap = disposable, as opposed to
| consumer devices you bought and could use for decades.
|
| Likewise, cheap clothes mean diminishing quality
| (regardless of price bracket, from $5 items to $200 brand-
| name ones, they are all most often than not made in
| sweatshops in the developing world, often with the same
| materials and processes). Plus tons of clothes thrown,
| which is an environmental attrocity.
|
| (As for cheap music and movies, that's a byproduct of one
| basic delevopment: high speed internet, which enabled a new
| delivery method. Not the best example of an increase in
| productivity, not to mention those are passtimes).
|
| As for "longer life expectancy", all accounts I've read say
| that we got that early on in the 20th century, so 100+
| years ago, and it was due to running water, bathrooms, hand
| washing, and a few such things. Low hanging fruit.
| Certainly not due to the last 70+ years of "increased
| productivity".
|
| Meanwhile we pay more for healthcare, housing, and
| education (the 3 things that matter more), wages have
| stagnated since the 70s, and work-life balance has gotten
| infinitely worse, depression ever more prevalent, the
| middle and working classes have collapsed, and so on. No
| savings and no chance of retirement at any reasonable age
| for the majority as well.
|
| > _I 'm often surprised about this idea we've got it worse
| off._
|
| Probably it's from people who are not impressed by more and
| cheaper trinkets.
| alexgmcm wrote:
| I think the tweet linked to by OP is using the colloquial
| definition of productivity (i.e. I can get more stuff done) and
| uses examples of computer technology etc.
|
| This isn't to be confused with the economic definition of GDP
| per hour worked - which has far more to do with the sectors of
| industry that a country has.
|
| After all, a few financiers doing million-dollar deals is
| always going to generate more GDP per hour than coltan miners,
| even though it's not obvious which is actually generating more
| wealth. Robert F Kennedy famously said the GNP "measures
| everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile".
| failuser wrote:
| You increase what you optimize for. GDP increase is the
| stated goal of most current societies and they work to
| achieve it.
| superkuh wrote:
| The material and capital gains of productivity improvements since
| the 1970s have gone to mega-corporations and their owners instead
| of to workers.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > The Great Dissipation.
|
| One of the shocks about entering the world of work was how little
| I often got done in any given day because I was in a meeting or
| had to deal with some form or was waiting on permission or many
| other things.
|
| I have had whole days disappear with nothing much to show for
| them at the end. I am sure I am not the only one. And even though
| it is almost assuredly known that this happens, nobody seems to
| care.
| dazc wrote:
| I had a job once where I did nothing except for when I would
| find things to do in order to quell the boredom.
|
| When I tell people this they are usually envious but I always
| say 'be careful what you wish for'. For me it was the most
| miserable period of my life.
|
| I've had depression and been homeless - that job was worse.
| satyrnein wrote:
| Meanwhile, one of the great shocks that I experienced when
| becoming a manager was that I had no better solution to keeping
| a large group of people aligned and unblocked than a bunch of
| meetings. Sure, I tinkered around the edges a bit, but it's not
| fundamentally different. Solutions welcome!
| strictfp wrote:
| Maintain a backlog for them, at least an idea backlog
| aranchelk wrote:
| The power of presupposition in questions: we're all trying to
| figure out where productivity has gone without questioning if it
| has in fact gone.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Almost feels like what is meant here is some kind of
| effectiveness at solving problems and coming up with new "stuff"
| - not productivity in a classical sense,
|
| From my observation there is something to it as most efforts are
| directed towards efficiency which is much easier to tackle
| (removing frictions etc.). Effectiveness is often a far less
| certain endeavor and therefore a tougher sell prior to having the
| solution.
| egypturnash wrote:
| The Great Disparity In Income surely has nothing to do with it.
| If the boss is making absurd multipliers of your income and
| barely paying you enough to get by, the last thing you wanna do
| is get your work done as fast as possible. Pad those hours, give
| yourself the raise the boss never will. Take stuff from work.
| [deleted]
| rdiddly wrote:
| Acknowledging receipt of the King Missile reference!
| egypturnash wrote:
| <3
| blueblimp wrote:
| > Technology calls our bluff. Improvements in technology show us
| that technology wasn't the obstacle that we thought it was.
|
| It would make sense that, as technology improves but humans
| don't, the bottleneck would eventually become the humans.
|
| To get around this would require improving the humans (via
| genetic engineering, for example) or going human-less (via
| artificial general intelligence, for example).
| captainbland wrote:
| Weird article, productivity has increased and is increasing. The
| real question is whether the result of that productivity is
| necessarily well harnessed, although that is subjective to a
| degree. Questions still remain, however, over why so much work is
| done and yet many of the individuals engaging in that work end up
| in in-work poverty. That huge amounts of the labour force cannot
| even afford their own housing.
|
| But I digress, I suspect there is a lot of "hidden" productivity
| that only emerges at the collective level, which is enabled
| primarily by better communication and transportation, that is not
| obvious at the individual level.
| sologoub wrote:
| > And while moving from Smith Corona 1950 to Word 95 is a big
| improvement, moving from Word 95 to Word 365 isn't.
|
| This is an interesting and very important point in overall
| computing today as well - for the vast majority of use cases,
| many of the todays top patterns are actually not just a small
| improvement, but are worse. Keyboard shortcuts are usually (not
| always) faster than mouse/trackpad driven visual pointers. Many
| of the current UIs are resource hogs that slow things down by a
| lot. UI patterns have also gotten somewhat less usable - in many
| cases one cannot easily tell of a surface is clickable in iOS and
| Android.
| IkmoIkmo wrote:
| I'm entirely clueless as to how to measure productivity at scale
| in a standardised manner.
|
| For example, washing machines create a lot of extra leisure,
| because it makes humans productive. A washing-machine assisted
| human can was 100x as much clothing in a given minute of
| operation time. But I have no clue where such a productivity
| improvement would show up in the data.
|
| Of course I can study things like 'how many hours do you spend
| maintaining your household', and you'd see that dropping decade
| after decade, despite living in ever larger homes with more
| functionality (and thus, a larger 'maintenance load'). That's
| productivity, and stand-alone it can be analysed and concluded as
| such.
|
| But fitting that into the same productivity data as say, the
| construction of homes per worker in an elegant way? I don't know
| how you would do that.
|
| Nor do I know how you account for completely different units
| across time and sectors. For example, how do we measure
| productivity of the pharmaceutical industry? Patents per person?
| Medicines launched? Number of lives saved by vaccines?
|
| A GDP per worked hour is of course a great start. But it leaves a
| lot out, too. For example, technology that sequences a genome for
| a penny in a short timespan may indirectly lead to gdp growth,
| perhaps, but in and of itself that massive cheap boost to a
| researchers' insight into a genome will not show up as a direct
| boost to GDP, in fact the opposite.
|
| Curious to understand from economists how such challenges are
| typically handled and what the data says.
| sudeepj wrote:
| Productivity compared to which time in the past? If we compare
| productivity today compared to say 1960/1950 then we have
| definitely improved. We can manufacture at speed & scale. We can
| communicate with people across the continents like never before.
| We can work-from-home to a large extent than ever before. We can
| destroy each other at much grander scale like never before.
|
| But like any system, any improvement in efficiency results in
| shifting the bottlenecks. It never truly goes away. The nature of
| the bottleneck may be different but its there. The things like
| "forms, compliance, process" are the new bottlenecks.
|
| Technology is a means to an end. It cannot be the end itself (at
| a macro level). Tech is by humans, for humans and of humans.
| Humans will always be the centerpiece for time to come (unless AI
| becomes so good as they potray in sci-fi films/tv-series).
| coding123 wrote:
| > This is what happened with the introduction of household
| appliances. Instead of spending less time doing laundry, for
| example, we do laundry more often.
|
| I have thoroughly debunked this commonly referenced saying. I
| don't have a washer and a dryer any more and I can't go into
| laundromats because Tide delivers a chemical burn. (Even with 2
| empty loads in a row.) No, I hand wash all my clothes and it
| takes way longer than if I did my laundry 5 times a week in my
| house if I had the machines.
| imtringued wrote:
| I don't understand this at all. Doesn't hand washing expose you
| to more chemicals?
| coding123 wrote:
| It would except that I use exclusively apple cidar vinegar.
| not the point.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| Possibly dumb question, but is there a reason you couldn't
| just pour vinegar into a top loader and wash in that?
|
| Also, why apple cider over white vinegar?
| reedlaw wrote:
| I took it to mean people used to wear clothes longer between
| washes, not just that we do more frequent, smaller loads. It
| would be interesting to see a comparison showing how much
| longer an average person should wear the same clothes in order
| to make hand washing time commensurate with machine washing
| time.
| coding123 wrote:
| Yeah I re-wear the same clothes a LOT and it still takes way
| more time.
| falsaberN1 wrote:
| I find it hard to agree with the article. With the escalation of
| technology the amount of things I get done every day, like,
| tangible, countable things, has skyrocketed, even more as my
| education with that technology went up. Not just programming and
| admin stuff, that includes stuff like art (cheaper, takes less
| time, gets nicer results) which some people argued would never
| ever be a replacement for traditional art (I still do some
| traditional things but I don't have shelves full of materials
| anymore). Not to mention new avenues like 3D modeling, I don't
| need a huge studio and large chunks of rock to create a 3D figure
| anymore, and there are ways to make it a real sculpture if I
| wanted. Music composing, I don't need several hundred dollars in
| instruments anymore (nor a complex soundproof studio). I don't
| need rooms full of machinery to make code or plan complex network
| arrangements, etc. And for the things that still need to be done
| the old way(c), there are better tools, information and whatnot.
|
| Most of my computer tasks are automated via scripts and homebrewn
| programs. Maybe I'm some sort of rare example of the third point
| in the article ("The productivity is here, it's just only
| harnessed by the indistractable few."), but I doubt I'm special
| in any way. It's not like the past had no distractions, and I'd
| argue distractions in the past were harder to dismiss (having to
| personally travel to X place to do Y paperwork instead of
| resolving that with a quick phone call or digital process).
|
| Sure, the pandemic made a few disasters in terms of paperwork and
| bureaucracy turning extremely slow, but I'd blame that more on
| poor organization than a side effect of technology.
| xondono wrote:
| > Most of my computer tasks are automated via scripts and
| homebrewn programs. Maybe I'm some sort of rare example of the
| third point in the article ("The productivity is here, it's
| just only harnessed by the indistractable few."), but I doubt
| I'm special in any way. It's not like the past had no
| distractions, and I'd argue distractions in the past were
| harder to dismiss (having to personally travel to X place to do
| Y paperwork instead of resolving that with a quick phone call
| or digital process).
|
| This makes you a rare example. I've been saying for years that
| the real computer revolution will happen when people work
| _with_ computers, rather than _on_ computers.
|
| Most of the workforce does the same things they did on paper
| but on a screen. For example, I've seen people fill out
| spreadsheets _manually_ , with a calculator.
|
| A lot of jobs have not seen the speedup of automation, while
| compliance costs keep growing.
| falsaberN1 wrote:
| >This makes you a rare example. I've been saying for years
| that the real computer revolution will happen when people
| work with computers, rather than on computers.
|
| Heh, it's funny you mention that, because I always had a
| deeply rooted philosophical belief that computers are tools,
| and a properly configured computing device is an "extension"
| of oneself. Not in some crazy cyberpunk sense of extension,
| but same as regular, old-school tools are customizable to
| better suit the user's hand, size or strength, so we can
| perform better with them, as if the tool was a part of our
| body.
|
| Sure, it does require a certain amount of know-how, but even
| at the barest there's some degree of organizational feature
| like moving launcher icons so you can reach for a tool
| without jumping through hoops. Every "papercut" removed
| helps.
|
| For example, this week I had a bit of a need to get text from
| some images. It's short enough bits of text that can be typed
| by hand, but that's _annoying_ , so I set up a couple scripts
| to get the text via OCR and copy it to clipboard, after
| massaging the input a little bit using imageMagick, and now I
| can quickly retrieve it with ridiculously small % of failure
| (and it's usually very obvious), and works with Japanese and
| everything. At least half a minute of back-and-forth was
| turned into a keypress and a verification step (I usually
| double-check what I type so that step was going to happen
| anyway). It's a tiny thing and not even remotely my finest
| work in the field, but everything adds up. Got lots of
| homemade tools to do pretty much everything I do regularly,
| and properly commented so it serves as a bit of a personal
| repo of arcane tricks and best practices. I even recoded a
| few tools in pure bash or awk/gawk so I can carry them around
| as fallbacks, which allows me to use those things in obsolete
| or busybox-tier systems.
|
| At this point I might as well admit it's a bit of a hobby.
| Having artistic skills also allows me to "brand" my system
| with custom decorations and of course allow me to draw
| comfortably by having most automation available from my left
| hand.
|
| Anyway, sorry for the long personal post, but the point is to
| use my experience as example of the things the computer can
| do for you if you are willing to put some time into making it
| behave the way you want, the way it suits your own usages,
| experiences and abilities and of course environment. Maybe
| all you need to be happily productive are a few custom
| document templates and rearranging some icons, or you do
| complex coding tasks that can be automated to save you from
| lots of busywork, or you are working with faulty hardware or
| unstable internet connection that requires some babysitting
| that can be automated with a few scripts. I'm not saying it's
| something everyone should know, but it might be useful for
| people to openly discuss their use cases and experiences,
| someone might have a recommendation or trick available and
| everyone wins. It's a lot like working in the kitchen if you
| think about it.
| xondono wrote:
| I try to do the same, for me WSL has been a godsend,
| because at work I'm forced to work on windows (a lot of
| engineering tools are windows only, and some of them don't
| work nicely even with fully virtualized environments).
|
| Having the scripts I use on my linux machine close has made
| my life easier.
|
| To my surprise, even very technical and knowledgeable
| people don't do this. For example, at work we log our time
| of entry and exit (in Spain this is required by
| government). I built a simple workflow that uses my phone
| location and automatically fills the log for me. Coders in
| my team, which I have shared the script with, are still
| logging each day _by hand_.
|
| I think it's more of a mindset than something that requires
| any particular skill.
| failuser wrote:
| Does the author really expect for computers to make writing
| novels by hand way more productive? This is such an edge case and
| the productivity increase is there (spelling, navigation, version
| control, there is dedicate software that helps you to make sure
| your lore and timelines are consistent), but until GPT can make
| consistent books no technology will help him with the core task:
| engaging story. In most other areas of human endeavor technology
| does increase productivity, no bluff there.
| alexgmcm wrote:
| I think people are doing more work than ever, but that doesn't
| mean the work is useful.
|
| Think about how much easier it is to build a SaaS or something
| vs. even just ten years ago, but that doesn't mean that the new
| stuff being built will bring economic value.
|
| In fact we might expect there to be diminishing returns in terms
| of what delivers real utility and thus improvements in
| productivity don't translate to a similar increase in wealth
| generation.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Everyone churning out Tiktok, Clubhouse, and Robinhood while we
| need more SpaceX and Teslas. I'm unsure how to tilt the
| equation so solving for hard (necessary) engineering is more
| profitable (or lower risk) than window dressing.
| alexgmcm wrote:
| "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to
| make people click ads." - Jeff Hammerbacher
| dcolkitt wrote:
| TikTok, Clubhouse and Robinhood have touched the lives of
| orders of magnitudes more people than Tesla or SpaceX.
|
| Tesla sold half a million cars last year. TikTok provided
| entertainment for a _billion_ people.
| paulpauper wrote:
| tesla does not exist in a vacuum though.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I think there's a disconnect in what we deem to be value.
| SpaceX has rapidly reduced the cost of lift to orbit (and
| shortly, revolutionizing global comms via StarLink). Tesla
| has forced an entire industry (light vehicles) to electrify
| by demonstrating very little compromise vs combustion
| vehicles while their stationary storage products are
| forcing thermal generators off the electrical grid
| (cannibalizing ancillary/frequency response revenue, the
| last pieces of significant revenue thermal generators are
| holding on to). TikTok, Clubhouse, and Robinhood are
| various degrees of poison (both at the individual level,
| and the societal level). They're our generation's Philip
| Morris and Standard Oil (imho).
| RandomLensman wrote:
| In the past, the systems that thought they knew top down
| what is "valuable" and what isn't in the economy and
| society in a more granular level didn't work out so well.
|
| Maybe the only reason we are spared extermination by some
| alien enemy is because our videos are so great (I think
| there is a short story from Philip K. Dick simikar to
| that).
| atonse wrote:
| I have held this view for most of my life. But now I kind
| of see them as complementary to each other.
|
| At the end of a workday, a spacex or Tesla employee will
| likely sit down and watch stupid tiktok videos or Netflix
| or any number of things the rest of us do (or just
| sleep).
|
| The point is that we need both these things and they do
| complement each other.
|
| The way I think of it though, is more about scarcity of
| talent.
|
| The idea that a really smart human being (a finite
| quantity) can either help build a better renewable energy
| system or a better video compression pipeline, that feels
| more obvious. One is using their talents to help
| humanity. The other is using their talents to help a
| company's bottom line but doesn't actually add to the
| pleasure of the audience or the enjoyment of humanity
| like the actual content does. And the cost of having a
| slightly less efficient video processing pipeline or
| subtitles software, is negligible compared to the cost of
| taking another five years to build better toilets, ways
| to recycle plastic, or use drones to plant trees.
|
| So it's less about whether the companies are useful. It's
| more about where we most need our best and brightest
| talents used.
|
| It's that gross misallocation of talent at places like
| Facebook, Netflix, and Apple that bothers me.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| Right, but if we go too far on this, you end up with the
| USSR's problem of having large investment in
| infrastructure but no investment in consumer goods.
|
| Although it might be true that we're over-investing in a
| sort of ultra-sugary sort of consumer goods that are not
| healthy for society in the long term.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| And was what TikTok did positive impact?
| colinmhayes wrote:
| You don't think bringing people joy is a positive impact?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Cocaine triggers a dopamine response (simplified, I dated
| someone with an addiction). Is that a positive impact?
| Moderation is important, as in reflection as to why
| you're enjoying something and if it's healthy.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| If cocaine was free I think it'd have a tremendously
| positive impact.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Maybe with robust social safety nets and mental health
| services available (Portugal model).
| trhway wrote:
| cocaine was cheap and easy available a century+ ago (for
| example the original Coca-Cola was an over-the-counter
| headache treating mix which contained alcohol and
| cocaine). Didn't lead to much positive impact. (Note: i'm
| for full unlimited legalization, though not because it is
| that good, it is just that 1.the adults have the right to
| practice Darwin theories and 2.the Prohibition is really
| bad)
| gilmore606 wrote:
| Were those people not being brought joy before TikTok?
| Did the amount of joy in the world increase? Does it
| increase with every new frivolous app? If so eventually
| we will be overwhelmed with the pure bliss of being
| alive, but that does not seem to be the trend.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Yes TikTok increases the joy its users experienced,
| otherwise they would still be doing what they were doing
| before.
|
| I do think people are much happier than they were 20 or
| even 10 years ago, largely thanks to the increased joy
| brought by better apps. Can that continue until people
| are "overwhelmed with the pure bliss of being alive"? No
| clue, doesn't seem likely, but it's certainly possible.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| That is just counting interactions, not the impact of the
| interactions.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| drug cartels "touch" the lives of millions of people and
| make billions in revenue and I'd say they are a net
| negative for society
|
| most consumer apps are net negatives that sell digital
| dopamine hits and studies have shown make people more
| depressed the more they use them
| jasfi wrote:
| What you do is more important that how quickly you can do it,
| unless you're very slow and doing the same thing most other
| people are.
| paulpauper wrote:
| The whole falling productivity meme is more of a myth and or
| overstated.
|
| It doesn't mean anything. Look how well the stock market has done
| over the past decade. No one losing sleep over a .1% reduction in
| total factor productivity or whatever.
|
| What matters more is if technology is advancing, are living
| standards rising,is the economy growing. The answer seems to be
| yes for all of those.
| sbelskie wrote:
| The economy is growing slower as are living standards(at least
| in the US post 1973 or so) because productivity growth has been
| slower. Both are obviously advancing, but more slowly.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| I am constantly distracted by others, by technology interruption
| products, and by life as I WFH.
|
| I have to attend too many zero value meetings which I generally
| ignore.
|
| I have to field questions constantly from people doing busy work
| then others wonder why I am not more productive.
|
| Technology might make process more efficient but the gains are
| filled with more distractions which prevent progress to providing
| real value to the widget I'm working on.
| ajuc wrote:
| Is this about productivity measured as economists usually define
| it (so - value added divided by hours worked)?
|
| It is a very misleadingly named indicator. If you're a barber
| working in a small village in a poor country you cut hair for 8
| people a day for 3 USD and pay 100 USD a month for renting a
| place and other costs. So your productivity is 20*24 - 100 = 420
| - 100 = 320 USD / 160 hours a month = 2 USD/hour.
|
| If you go to a big city in developed country you now take 30 USD
| per haircut and still do 8 of them a day and pay 1000 USD for
| rent and other stuff. That results in a productivity of 20
| USD/hour. You had become "10x barber" just like that :)
|
| It has nothing to do with how well or fast you cut hair or how
| "productive" or distracted you are. It's all about the price of
| labor.
|
| If that's the productivity we're talking about then the answer is
| "Great Averaging". Every job that could be moved to low-income
| countries to lower the costs - is. So the cost of labor goes
| down. Meanwhile land prices and patents and brands remain in
| high-income countries. So the relative cost of labor is lowered
| (or at least its growth is artificially slowed down). For people
| in low-income countries (like me) the "productivity" goes up, for
| people in high-income countries it goes down. Great Averaging.
|
| A good physical analogy would be 2 containers with water. 1 with
| hot water and 1 with cold water. When you connect them the water
| in both changes temperatures in opposite ways. And you can
| extract work from the temperature difference (that's what the
| millionaires who do the outsourcing do).
|
| It also increases local inequalities (you get rich people in poor
| countries and poor people in rich countries), but decreases the
| inequality globally.
| docflabby wrote:
| Speculation and rent seeking are currently being rewarded more
| than hard work in this phase of the economic cycle, combined with
| high inflation which is eroding gdp in real terms.
| bob33212 wrote:
| In 2007 I ran an automated testing team for a product that had
| 60M in revenue. It was just me by myself. Today you can find
| startups with less than 5M in revenue with 5 people with the same
| productivity. Organizations have expanded to fill the budget
| provided of them mostly through headcount. Similar to Conway's
| Law.
| chelsea102 wrote:
| This anecdote proves little. Even if taken as representative,
| there are valid reasons for a differing level of investment,
| like:
|
| - importance of quality to the product domain
|
| - differences in talent levels and supply of talent
|
| - differences in company stage and expected future revenue
| growth
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