[HN Gopher] Why Doesn't Software Show Up in Productivity?
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Why Doesn't Software Show Up in Productivity?
Author : Wildgoose
Score : 184 points
Date : 2021-08-16 10:42 UTC (12 hours ago)
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| sammyloso wrote:
| It is because we are no longer improving our society's "hardware"
| (read: infrastructure). No matter how quickly i can design a BIM
| model using state of the art software; i am still constrained by
| the fact that it takes me an hour to drive to work, an hour to my
| client's house, and then an hour back to the office, and then an
| hour home.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| You can't eliminate all the paperwork and archival jobs twice.
|
| Some of the improvements tied to communication require cultural
| changes that can be slow. Telemedicine has been possible for a
| long time, but the shift only picked up steam due to Covid.
| amelius wrote:
| If productivity stalled it's because we now have the equivalent
| of a TV set/entertainment system on our desks.
| wantsanagent wrote:
| I take issue with the basic assumption of the article. Sustained
| productivity growth is _hard_ and would not have continued
| without the software revolution.
|
| Let's take a look at agriculture.
|
| https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2018/march/agricultural...
|
| Mechanization and the widespread adoption and improvement of
| mechanized farming has lead to staggering productivity / farmer
| growth over the last 70 years. But there is only so much you can
| do with "dumb" machines. Today growth is being driven by
| computerized information gathering, planning, monitoring, and
| precision planting / soil maintenance.
|
| To _maintain_ a growth curve takes constant innovation. Just
| because the growth doesn 't significantly alter its slope does
| _not_ mean that there is a missing improvement bump.
|
| If you decomposed slopes like these you would see they are
| compound sigmoids where growth is driven by one technology and
| then another, or an adoption of a new process, etc.
|
| So IMO if "software doesn't show up in productivity" you're not
| looking hard enough.
| jldugger wrote:
| And TFP is a real monster of a formula[1]. It's not just GDP /
| hours. There's like 20 variables going into it's calculation,
| including things like 'labor quality' and 'capital's share of
| income' (alpha).
|
| I'm not a smart man, but I think this suggests that a society
| that lays off factory workers and retrains them as software
| engineers will not register on this metric. And looking at
| alpha, there's a pretty clear phase change at 2000 -- it's
| hovering at 31-33 for 50 years, then marches up from 0.31 to
| 0.38. Sounds to me like you could tell a story that labor _is_
| more productive, but seeing less of the gains than before.
|
| edit: just to belabor the point, here's a random chart I
| googled for US productivity that _doesn't_ feature the same
| trendline: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-
| states/productivity. If anything it looks like productivity has
| accellerated during the past 20 years.
|
| [1]: https://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/indicators-
| data/tota...
| dalbasal wrote:
| Extremely worthwhile question, long overdue.
|
| Productivity, especially in relevant areas like administration,
| stagnated despite computers hitting every desk. I read the Cowen
| book (Complacent Class) at the same time I was reader Graeber's
| "Bullshit Jobs." Heterodox writers from both sides of the
| spectrum. Same observation.
|
| On the face of it, it doesn't make sense. How could, for example,
| a local college's administration not have become more efficient
| because of computers?
|
| A factory's productivity, which has legible inputs and outputs is
| _really_ different to something which doesn 't.
|
| Software is management technology, perhaps, but only in cases
| that management technology is pretty efficient already. Modern
| warehouses, ports and stuff _are_ more productive because of
| software. But, they we already pretty efficient. They already had
| pretty well formalized, legible processes.
|
| That said, software is also a tool. Say your job is to receive
| applications, payments or such. You process them. File. Respond.
| Software is undeniably a good tool for such things. We can't
| abstract that away by looking at the top level trends. It _is_ a
| productivity tool for administrative tasks. Top line trends don
| 't suggest a productivity gain, but I'm not willing to conclude
| that software is not an administrative tool.
|
| On the face of it, banks, universities, government departments,
| the legal sector, accounting, perhaps the whole finance sector
| are bigger today, not smaller. They have computers now, which
| _are_ productivity tools. WTF is going on?
|
| Do we have more justice, better records? What is "productivity"
| anyway, outside of legible productivity like a factory's?
| tshaddox wrote:
| > On the face of it, it doesn't make sense. How could, for
| example, a local college's administration not have become more
| efficient because of computers?
|
| Is the claim from those books that the administration of small
| colleges has _not_ become more efficient because of computers?
| I would have guessed that there are _far_ fewer employees (per
| student) doing clerical work at small colleges now than before
| office PCs were ubiquitous.
| dalbasal wrote:
| There are more employees (per student) doing _administrative_
| work at small colleges now than before office PCs were
| ubiquitous.
|
| "Clerical* isn't really a term we use much now, and it's
| often associated with job descriptions from before the PC
| era. Stuff that happens in colleges, in office, that isn't
| academia, is generally known as administration. We have more
| of it, whatever you call it.
| tshaddox wrote:
| "Administration" strikes me as too broad to make a
| reasonable comparison before and after PCs. I would expect
| that in the same time frame that office PCs came into
| existence, the roles of colleges has also expanded greatly,
| and if those new roles are considered as part of
| "administration" I don't think the comparison tells you
| much about the effects of computers. Are we counting things
| like counseling, career planning, financial aid, health
| (including mental health), immigration services, legal and
| compliance work, everything related to sports and
| athletics, etc.?
| gred wrote:
| > Productivity, especially in relevant areas like
| administration, stagnated despite computers hitting every desk.
|
| I don't know if this has been quantified, but to some extent
| the extra capability is simply repurposed to more detailed
| administration. Things that were not possible become possible.
| Things that we did not have time for, we suddenly have time to
| do. Per Parkinson, "work expands so as to fill the time
| available for its completion".
|
| An example would be logistics within the US -- at some point,
| probably after 9/11 or a similar event, it was decided that all
| packages flying in commercial airlines within the US needed to
| be vouched for by entities known to the US government, the
| individual packages tracked at a more detailed level, etc. This
| would not have been possible without automation throughout the
| industry, and definitely "soaked up" some of the productivity
| benefits of this automation.
|
| I'm sure there are endless other examples.
| masklinn wrote:
| That also happens in e.g. manufacturing. I was talking to an
| uncle who worked in aluminium manufacturing, he was
| explaining that as computers developed they could convert
| waste to very precisely understood ingots (in terms of
| composition), then when an order arrives the manufacturing
| program would know exactly what ingots should be picked to
| fulfil the order with as little pure metal (both aluminium
| and solutes) as possible, as that's where the plant's margin
| was. Iirc he told me they were above 99% (so only needed pure
| aluminium straight out of a smelter for less than 1% of their
| production).
| ThrustVectoring wrote:
| IMO the biggest "improvement" that this sort of clerical
| "productivity" generates is that the same workforce can keep up
| with inflicting even more inane bureaucratic demands on the
| people forced to interact with it.
| bluGill wrote:
| Prevented waste is a lot of it. Factories used to produce full
| on until inventory built up too much, and then they did
| clearance sales to empty it, or sometimes sent it right to a
| landfill. Now with just in time there is less produced than
| before, but it is only produced as needed, so the total
| produced is less, but what is produced is what is needed.
| analog31 wrote:
| In practice just in time means that the vendor carries the
| inventory. Or the customer.
| handrous wrote:
| I've had a suspicion for some years that productivity increases
| from the addition of computers and software to an operation is
| _very_ uneven, and that apparent great progress overall is
| because it 's a 1000x improvement in select areas while being a
| 0.5-1.05x change in _most_ areas, with somewhat negative change
| perhaps even being the norm.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Perhaps. Why though?
|
| Why aren't HR, accounting or other such tasks more productive
| with computers than without?
| robotresearcher wrote:
| They are. Hence the steep gradient section 1995-2003 as
| computers and internet were added. But you don't keep
| getting additional benefit at the same rate.
|
| Go from paper to spreadsheet workflow? Useful step. But
| then what? Eliminate the typing pool? Saves money. Then
| what?
|
| Diminishing returns are to be expected.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| With paper, you do it _your way_ , which maps to the
| organisation's way at both ends (and is probably just a
| minor improvement over the organisation's way). With
| computers, unless you can reprogram the system (which is
| tricky even for programmers), you're doing it the
| computer's way, which is often worse than the way the
| organisation would want to have it set up.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Not a bad hypothesis.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| "which maps to the organisation's way at both ends"
|
| this isn't always a positive or benefit to an org as a
| whole, although sometimes it's a net benefit to a
| specific decision maker.
|
| many times the "org's way" was set years ago by someone
| who doesn't even work there any longer, and they chose
| "steps XYZ" because it's all that was available at the
| time. As things grow, the org info changes, needs change,
| and people try to squeeze new exceptions and rules in to
| the existing process. No one has 'authority' to revamp
| the process (whether with computers or not), and it just
| gets weirder and weirder.
|
| "If the customer number starts with W and their date is
| earlier than 2007, give them a 10% credit on any items
| they ordered from the summer catalog, then email
| joe@ourcompany.com".
|
| "There's no Joe that works here... ?"
|
| "Don't try to change anything - this works just fine as
| it is".
| handrous wrote:
| I also suspect management is placing a high value on some
| ideal of "total visibility" into their organization, for
| which they are sold computerization as a solution, and
| are willing to accept significantly greater friction
| across their organization in order to get it. They
| imagine it will be of such great value that it'll be
| worth it.
|
| Of course what happens is one or (usually) both of: they
| aren't actually ready or able to use that visibility for
| any productive purpose sufficient to justify its (labor-
| to-use, and direct monetary) cost; the system doesn't
| actually deliver so perfect a view as they wanted (though
| it may _act like_ it does).
| PeterisP wrote:
| Well, they certainly are, you need a much smaller
| department to do the same things, and those departments
| relied on people like "secretarial pool" for typing
| documents, people carrying internal mail, etc - so
| productivity of generic business administration tasks
| certainly has increased.
|
| However all of those gains would appear with basic "office
| computerization" in late 1990s and early 2000s (which is
| quite visible as productivity growth in the article) with
| wordperfect/word and visicalc/1-2-3/excel, and not
| meaningfully changed with more recent develpoments.
| Accounting today is automated roughly as much as you could
| in 2000, at least if you were up to date with year 2000
| tech.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Agreed on the timeline. We certainly did have a lot of
| roles, like secretaries and typists that we don't have
| anymore. That happened 1980-2000ish.
|
| That said if you look at HR departments and such, they're
| not smaller today.
| cxr wrote:
| > A factory's productivity, which has legible inputs and
| outputs is really different to something which doesn't.
|
| I've worked in the semiconductor industry, and the situation is
| just as bad over there, if not worse.
|
| To the common capitalist's credit, this absolutely has to do
| with lack of competition (not necessarily due to regulation,
| but because the cost of the ticket to get in--capital to build
| and operate a fab--is so high). Under something more Taylor-
| esque, 2x productivity is on the low end of what I'd expect a
| contender to be able to operate at, relative to the clip that
| the small pool of incumbents move at. The main sources of
| inefficiency based on what I observed 2014-2020 are either
| people problems or process problems that call for technical
| solution that doesn't look anything like materials science,
| chemistry, physics, etc. (Elite overproduction poorly
| trained/selected workforce + terrible, absolutely godawful
| software supporting the whole operation; bullshit jobs abound.)
| agumonkey wrote:
| For offices, non tech saavy places, my experience hints at the
| fact that computers are far from being a main factor.
|
| Software is not mastered even by people in charge of picking
| it. It changes all the time. Users are (might be different with
| the next gen) digital-first, also software design regressed a
| lot, as400 terminals were so damn fast and predictable. Now
| users have desks with various UI paradigms (2021 people still
| don't know if single or double click will cause an action, from
| a hand tool pov it's an absolute failure, but software is not
| approached like a tool, except maybe industrial settings with
| big buttons and lag free interfaces)
|
| Fun bit: intranet failed the other day, had to use good old
| paper template filled manually. It took me (newb here) 2
| minutes. With the webapp it's 3 or more, with lots of clicks
| and waits and maybes... Beside a DB tracking the document
| creation it's of zero value.
|
| I could go on further but not right now.
| frumper wrote:
| The DB tracking is the primary benefit. Run a report on all
| of those paper templates. Look up papers filled out last
| Tuesday, or July 3rd for the past 10 years. The software only
| makes staff job easier because now they enter it once and
| they're done instead of pulling files and compiling reports
| as a manual process every time the boss needs something.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Man, trust me, they probably don't even have useful
| accountability . By useful I mean the db is there, maybe
| some very niche service has some statistical view of what's
| going on, but main manager actually gives tally paper for
| people to write down by hand what they do on a daily basis.
| Primitive redundancy on all layers, plus absolute fake
| data, any employee in this kind of structure will lie and
| double the digits.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Lots of places have multiple software systems with "glue
| humans" in between to read information in one system and
| re-enter data into another.
|
| You will often find that management has no idea that they
| have extra people doing literally nothing. These data entry
| clerks have titles that represent a process so it's thought
| of as the person doing that job (and perhaps that glue
| process does run partially on their tacit knowledge). The
| only requirement was for reporting which their pointless
| task of data re-entry accomplishes. Not much serious
| thought was given to productivity really.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I often try to estimate how much information is flowing
| in a give office. I may be wrong but I believe a recent
| iphone could handle storage and processing. Takes 5
| minutes for a person to input a few tokens here and
| there.
| swalsh wrote:
| This is off topic a bit since the article was really talking
| about something tangently different, and it's probably a really
| unpopular thing to say, but it's been in my mind for a while. If
| you look at the worlds population growth rate, you can see that
| it is beginning to level off. That world of 10 billion that we
| were all preparing for several years ago is probably not going to
| come.
|
| If the population stabalizes, or even starts shrinking, how
| important is growth of productivity? Making "Stuff" is obviously
| important, but in a world with lowering demand, maybe quality and
| distribution are the metrics we should be concentrating on.
|
| I have 2 kids, I am the only one with kids in both mine and my
| wifes family. My 2 kids are the only grandkids between 3 sets of
| grandparents (wife's parents got divorced and remarried). They
| are inudated with LOADS of stuff. So much so that it's a real
| problem. I tell my parents to stop buying them stuff. They think
| i'm joking. I'm not. IT'S TOO MUCH STUFF. I wish they would all
| go in, and just get my kids 1 good high quality thing. They just
| don't need all this cheap low quality stuff.
|
| I bring this up, because thinking this way is a different
| paradigm. Agile is still very relavent to quality driven
| development. But scale less so.
| wefarrell wrote:
| It doesn't look like world population growth is slowing at all:
| https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL?end=2020&st...
|
| What reason do you have to believe that the population will top
| off at 10 billion?
| Retric wrote:
| That's a legacy of increasing life expectancy not increasing
| number of births. ~139 Million people where born in 1988 and
| ~140 Million people where born in 2020.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/births-and-deaths-
| project...
|
| ~140 Million * global life expectancy of 72.6 years is ~10
| Billion people.
| wefarrell wrote:
| More of those births are making past infancy:
|
| https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.IMRT.IN?end=201
| 9...
| Retric wrote:
| Sure, and more people are living to 40 etc. But without
| more births population is simply a question of (life
| expectancy) * (birth rate).
| [deleted]
| orolle wrote:
| Its a different discussion, quite off topic. When the boomers
| go into retirement, our current economic system with GDP growth
| focus has a big problem. Our system is based on produce more
| stuff and buy more stuff. But when the boomers retire, they
| will buy less stuff. Who will buy supply overhang? Nobody. Even
| worse, who will pay for the debt incurred to buy overly
| inflated asset prices, like housing and factories, when boomers
| start downsizing and start selling?
|
| Look at Japan. They are 10 years ahead of us. It will be tough
| and depressing until the economic system adapted and prices
| normalized. On an opitmistic point, humanity will progress and
| when an economy cannot sell more stuff then it has to sell
| better stuff.
| WhompingWindows wrote:
| Japan is not an apt demographic corollary for the USA. The
| census recently came out and found that the number of Asian
| and Hispanic residents of the USA has increased (~20-30%)
| hugely since 10 years ago. These are younger populations with
| higher birth-rates than "White" people, whose percentile
| share of the US is heading downwards.
|
| Japan, on the other hand, is xenophobic and has discouraged
| immigration very heavily. Combine that xenophobia with
| historical matters: sneak-attacking an industrial powerhouse
| in 1941 in of the most ill-advised, terrible wars, losing
| repute by massacring hundreds of thousands of civilians.
| Meanwhile thousands upon thousands of their own best young
| men and civilians were killed by the vastly superior man-
| power and industrial might of the US. Japan was hobbled by
| WW2 and has never fully recovered, consider the greatest
| catastrophes of their history were only 80 years ago still,
| namely losing a generation of youth, their cities being fire-
| bombed, their savings being depleted for phony war bonds, and
| being the only country to ever be nuked. Japan is simply not
| a good demographic comparator for the USA.
| zazen wrote:
| You're trying to explain current Japanese demographics with
| a weird rant about WW2 without mentioning the subsequent
| economic miracle and population growth? The population of
| Japan was not far off doubling from 1945 to 2010, and in
| case you somehow haven't noticed, they became a major
| first-world economy, eclipsing many many nations which were
| not nuked.
|
| 80 years is really quite a long time. Germany also bounced
| back rapidly in the second half of the twentieth century to
| become a major industrial power.
| zie wrote:
| I don't disagree it could definitely be a problem with the
| US, but so far, with immigration, it's not been a problem. As
| long as our immigration #'s stay up, the US should be fine.
|
| So far it's been a steady state, but it's unknown if that
| will continue into the future.
| swalsh wrote:
| In the not too distant future, competition for immigration
| is going to be tough. I wonder if the US has the political
| atmosphere to offer competitive packages to win over the
| immigrants we'll need.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Why do you think that? It feels that the mid-term (e.g.
| 20-40 years) outlook for migration would include a large
| increase of migrant supply due to e.g. climate change
| issues in the "global south", so instead of competition
| for immigration it seems likely that places like US would
| be able to pick whatever kind of migrants they'd prefer
| to allow.
| swalsh wrote:
| Yes, supply of immigrants will increase because of
| climate change, but I think it's important to understand
| the current structure of age distributions in the world.
| The US had a pretty large Millenial generation. Most
| other countries did not. Which means, we're not REALLY
| going to be feeling the need to take on immigrants for a
| while. But as boomers retire, and millenials move to
| replace them, the countries that didn't have a sizable
| millenial generation are going to be in a position to
| have a much higher demand. Those countries are going to
| be more desperate than the US, and will likely start
| developing very sizable offers. The US is going to catch
| up though, the US does appear to be inverting it's
| demographic distribution as well, but we're 20 years
| behind. That's actually a pretty big advantage in a bunch
| of ways, but in terms of competing for immigrants, it's a
| disadvantage.
| orolle wrote:
| Thanks, good points!
| the_laka wrote:
| Low Code and No Code platforms transform the whole premise
| though. They do make it easy to "show it how to attach a
| fastener, then walk away".
|
| Too bad, as developers, we scorn those platforms instead of
| improving them to the point we'd be obsolete.
| hyperman1 wrote:
| In my experience, Low Code tries to fix the non-problem and
| makes the real problem worse. They will get you up to speed
| fast, but with a much lower output plateau than normal
| programming tools. Some experience from one low code tool I
| used this year:
|
| Non-problem: Writing code. This is the easy part. COBOL took
| typists, gave them a week of courses, which made them
| successful basic coders. Low code helps the most basic junior
| but slows down the average coder by forcing everything trough
| drag and drop.
|
| Problem: Reading code. Most low code platforms I've seen show
| you only a small part of the code, needing a lot of clicking
| around in a GUI to make sure you found it all. It either
| transform it in a mess of arrows and boxes or spread it out so
| wide you spend more time scrolling than reading. I've found
| myself reading the XML dumps of our current tool just to spare
| me some time.
|
| Problem: One size fits all. You can't polish or finetune the
| standard components. What you see is what you get. This
| guarantees you both a minimum and a maximum level of quality.
| Yes, there are escape hatches. No, they won't help you. You
| will make parts of your program unstable or less user friendly
| because your low-code vendor didn't foresee all of your needs.
|
| Problem: Versioning. Boxes and arrows don't merge well. There
| is generally only a small team working on 1 piece of code. You
| can't scale it past 3-4 people. Also, emergency fixes in prod
| don't easily propagate back to dev, especially in a high-stress
| situations. You'll have to do it manually. This almost
| guarantees regression bugs.
|
| Problem: Searching code. If you have enough code, the day comes
| where you'll need to find all references to something. I've
| grepped code bases of >10 000 000 lines. Can't do it in more
| than the most limited way with low code.
|
| Problem: knowledge exchange. Something like stack exchange
| works because you can type text. Print screen is the only
| option available in most low code tools.
|
| As the saying goes, the core of ICT is not programming but
| Information and Communication. If you want to make programmers
| obsolete, you need tools that help you organize information and
| ease communication.
|
| Low code is simply the wrong way to look at the problem. it
| ends up throwing tons of man-hours at a problem. In the long
| term, it creates more programmer jobs, not less.
| stdbrouw wrote:
| But that's exactly what people used to think in the 60s and
| 70s: instead of requiring a bunch of electrical engineers to
| build some arcane contraption, now ordinary folks can just
| write something that almost looks like English and you can
| automate anything and do calculations in seconds that used to
| take months! If that didn't pan out even though it seemed so
| freaking obvious that it _would_ , why will No Code be any
| different?
| toolslive wrote:
| Yes! SQL for example, was invented for business people to
| allow them to pull their own reports iso having to bother
| programmers to do it for them. We all know what really
| happened.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Millions of business people pulling their own reports? That
| is a thing.
| bildung wrote:
| To add an anecdote: No Code already was the hot new thing in
| the 90s when I studied CS. You could click together custom
| interfaces in Delphi and even do basic wiring with clicking
| alone, IIRC. Devs expected that laypeople click together the
| solution they want and developers do the remaining wiring.
| Yet no non-developer could actually use that thing. Nowadays
| I think the main hurdle is the transformation of a fluffy
| real world problem into something of an algorithm. Developers
| do this almost unconsciously, because they practice this all
| the time, and thus are usually not aware of it. Yet this
| process of quantification of the real world problem often is
| the actual problem, not writing it down as code.
| carbonguy wrote:
| > I think the main hurdle is the transformation of a fluffy
| real world problem into something of an algorithm.
|
| I came to a very similar conclusion after I had been
| teaching programming in high school for a few years: the
| difficulty of "programming" is in learning to think
| algorithmically, and no amount of "No Code" tooling gets
| you around that problem. The article alludes to this with
| the "PBJ sandwich problem" - people are used to specifying
| processes based on a collective (and often unconscious)
| cultural understanding, which computers obviously do not
| share!
| hvidgaard wrote:
| I'm inclined to agree. One of the most successful "No Code"
| programs is Excel. Yet we still, time and time again, see
| people struggle with basic calculations in it. It's literally
| elementary school mathematics we're talking about.
|
| I think most "No Code" and especially RPA in general will
| fall into that. The required mindset to think
| programmatically is not something the majority of people have
| unfortunately. But "No Code" will enable those that is
| somewhat technically inclined and able to think sufficiently
| programmatically.
| dgb23 wrote:
| We are doing that though. There are tons of flexible systems
| like that, where developers provide components/plugins and
| somewhat technical people, or rather domain experts fit them
| together for a specific task. Wordpress, Unity3d, Shopify to
| name a few.
| shakezula wrote:
| If software is process, then what does that say about the labor
| value of software?
|
| Related: I think that software engineering is going to be the new
| blue collar warehouse or factory job that a good chunk of boomers
| enjoyed.
| neogodless wrote:
| This article makes me think of the woodworker's dilemma. You
| might start working with cutting, planing, joining and finishing
| wood because you want to make a chair or end table, and you like
| the idea of learning to do it yourself, maybe saving some money,
| or at least getting some extra tools out of the process, and
| having some pride in your work. But before you know it, you've
| spent 4 years accumulating tools, but more importantly, getting
| really good at making jigs, shelves, etc. to organize your tools
| and make your hobby easier and more enjoyable. In fact, you spend
| 90% of your time building tools. You do this not because you have
| to, but because you enjoy it. And because the brain makes it so
| easy to think of new ways you can use the skills you're building
| to make more tools in a virtuous cycle.
|
| When you actually build a chair or end table, you complete the
| project, and you do enjoy the fruits of that labor, but there's
| no real cycle there. It's just an ending.
|
| Software developers might fall into a similar trap, being so
| enthralled with building their own tools, writing libraries,
| designing and implementing frameworks, creating processes like
| CI/CD that obviously make the whole software development life
| cycle better... but of course it's largely an internal cycle
| that's more interesting than a lot of the end results of software
| that might actually benefit business (and measurable
| productivity.)
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| > In fact, you spend 90% of your time building tools.
|
| This is a ridiculous exaggeration with almost any wood worker.
| Making tools and jigs doesn't require much time and someone
| usually only does it after they have already done something
| without them at least once.
|
| Programming tools are much more difficult to make. You need
| special skills and most tools aren't made to be easily
| extended.
| tharne wrote:
| I'd argue woodworking tools are harder. People expect
| physical objects to work correctly, whereas the word has
| largely come to accept buggy, glitchy software.
| majormajor wrote:
| Look at some houses for sale where the owner did
| maintenance and you might be surprised how many people
| accept buggy shit there too. ;)
| tharne wrote:
| Didn't think of that, you're 100% right
| bluGill wrote:
| I make jigs because I can't figure out how to do a project
| without it. I rarely make the same thing twice, but a lot of
| things need a special jig to do right.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| There are two things here and the more important thing by
| far is that making something like a jig is nothing compared
| to making a programming tool. You can measure, scribe and
| cut a few times then drive self tapping screws and have
| something useful. Making something not only new but
| integrate with some existing tool doesn't take an hour, it
| takes weeks months or years.
| bluGill wrote:
| I do a lot of jig like things when programming. Sometimes
| I spend months perfecting helper code, but sometimes I
| only need it to run once and I'm done in a few hours.
| Guthur wrote:
| I that while you observation is true the cause is something
| else. When looking to do something productive (write software
| or apply wood working skills) we are a mostly a victim of our
| on worldly experience. A software engineer lives and breathes
| software development and so it's only natural that he only sees
| software problems and so commences with implementing solutions
| for those problems.
|
| Sometimes there are other problems but it's really our live
| experiences that limit us from building enough of an affinity
| with them to naturally want to solve them.
| kiba wrote:
| As I remember Elon Musk saying, the best part is no part.
| Likewise, same for process.
|
| The worst thing an engineer can do is optimize to a requirement
| that don't need to exist.
| ilammy wrote:
| > _As I remember Elon Musk saying, the best part is no part._
|
| IIRC, the saying originates from Mikhail Koshkin who designed
| the T-34 tank, often extended with "...but the essential
| function still performed".
| kiba wrote:
| That may be so, but it doesn't prevent people from
| relearning concepts.
| cxr wrote:
| The original comment citing Musk was fine. The followup
| comment citing Koshkin was fine. There was no adversarial
| subtext in the second comment. No defense of the first
| comment was (or is) needed.
| swalsh wrote:
| As a woodworker, i've noticed 90% of time is easily spent on
| setting the tools up. Jigs help save time because they let you
| spend less time setting up tools.
|
| Economy of scales are gained when you can get more products out
| of the same number of tool setups.
| thinkmassive wrote:
| Similar to setting up dotfiles or a library so they can be
| reused in your next environment.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| That is why I use hand tools. For most one of items, it's not
| slower. And I'm actually shaping and joining wood instead of
| spending most time adjusting machines. I've got enough of
| that in my day job.
| SteveGerencser wrote:
| Very much this. I also work in wood and it amazes people that
| it can often be easier to make 5 or 10 of something than just
| one simply because of the jigs we make.
| hvs wrote:
| A few nits to pick as a woodworker:
|
| 1) You never save money building it yourself (at least not in
| comparison to a standard consumer option, like a chair or table
| from your local furniture store. This may hold up if you
| compare what you build to high-end hardwood furniture. But with
| the cost of tools, you're probably still losing money if this
| is just a hobby)
|
| 2) 90% of my enjoyment of woodworking is just being in my shop
| working. The results are almost secondary. It's a hobby for a
| reason.
|
| 3) I know professional woodworkers and they definitely _do not_
| spend most of their time building organization. They buy
| anything that will speed up production. I can spend 6 months
| building a dream workbench, they 'll go to Benchcrafted and
| just buy one.
| mrmuagi wrote:
| > 1) You never save money building it yourself
|
| Yes and no.
|
| The deciding factor besides fixed cost of tools is your time.
| Consider kitchen cabinets. Sure you can build them
| yourselves, but it'll take weeks, maybe a month of your time
| which when compared to ikea/box store cabinets you could
| spend more to save time. If you want to spend even more you
| can get some custom work done at the cost of having little to
| no effort needed.
| bartread wrote:
| > You never save money building it yourself
|
| I know where you're coming from with this. I've been
| refurbing my house myself and I doubt I've saved that much
| because the "saving" has meant that I've been able to buy
| tools and, of course, better quality materials (e.g., more
| expensive flooring). I've also often chosen to go the extra
| mile with improvements where I might have scaled back if I
| were paying someone. I suppose you could argue this is a
| saving in that I've got more value out of the money I've
| spent by treating my own time as "free labour", but have I
| spent less? I doubt it.
|
| Still, I don't know if it's entirely true in all
| circumstances. Here, for example, TheGeekPub (The 8-Bit Guy's
| brother) manages to save himself a ton by building his own
| electronics station rather than buying one or paying a
| carpenter to do it for him:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KfWMJV7fQ0
|
| But then, as becomes evident when you watch the video, he
| already owned all the tools he needed and just had to buy the
| materials, which were relatively inexpensive.
|
| I think the results look great though, and it's clearly an
| extremely functional piece of furniture.
|
| Like a lot of things in life, does it save you money? It
| really depends on your starting conditions (skill level,
| tools and facilities), and how much you want to invest in the
| project (both time and money).
| agumonkey wrote:
| In stuff like car/van furnishings I tend to believe you can
| save a lot since its not yet an IKEA like market.
| nathancahill wrote:
| Absolutely. A van buildout gets crazy pricey when you
| contract it out. It's relatively easy and cheap to DIY.
| pbronez wrote:
| > You never save money building it yourself
|
| This comes up in the DIY Audio community. It seems like the
| economic value proposition is very sensitive to what
| commercial segment you compare against. You absolutely can't
| beat low-end, mass-produced speakers on price, but it's easy
| to beat high-end, boutique speakers on price while getting
| close on quality.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| A common money-saving trick is to buy cheap electronics
| from AliExpress or the likes and upgrade just the right
| components.
|
| Often, these dirt cheap products are based on pretty decent
| ICs, but with corners cut on the surrounding circuitry.
| Sometimes, just changing some components to match the
| reference circuit can do wonders. Sometimes it is just a
| matter of replacing a counterfeit cap with a bigger
| counterfeit cap :)
| isomorph wrote:
| Where can I find out more about this community?
| Upgrayyed_U wrote:
| Search for audiophile forums on the net. Most will have a
| dedicated area for DIYers.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I built my dream workbench. The commercial ones were too
| light. I wanted one that was 8 feet long, and 4 deep, that I
| could bolt a big vise to, and whale away at whatever was in
| the vise without the bench scittering across the floor.
|
| It is build entirely from 4x4s for the legs, 2x4s for the
| rest of the frame, and 1x8 planks for the top and shelf. It's
| all held together with carriage bolts so it can be
| disassembled, and the top can be replaced. No plywood or
| glued sawdust.
|
| It only took an hour or so to put together. Very happy with
| it. I later installed wall sockets in the front so power
| cords needn't be draped over the top.
|
| The only problem was drilling the bolt holes perpendicular. I
| later acquired a drill press to solve that.
| euroderf wrote:
| Sounds good. Post a sketch or plan somewhere ?
| WalterBright wrote:
| Not much to it. No sawing required other than the length.
| 6 4x4 vertical posts in a 3 by 2 configuration. A skirt
| around the top of 2x4s, and another 1/3 up from the
| ground. A 2x4 connecting the center posts at top and
| bottom. Then just plank the top, and plank 1/3 up to make
| a shelf. Drill & bolt.
|
| Don't tighten the bolts until it is all together. Then
| set it in place and let it settle all the posts firmly on
| the floor, then tighten.
|
| I left it au natural because I like the look and feel of
| sawn wood.
|
| Hope you like yours as much as I like mine.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> You never save money building it yourself_
|
| I agree, if what you want is a standard chair or table. But
| its common that I will want some piece of furniture that
| exactly fits some space or is otherwise unusual. For example,
| shelves that exactly fit my rooms.
|
| It does help that I have somewhat low standards for
| appearance, and am quite content building things out of cheap
| wood.
| jjk166 wrote:
| You'd still probably be better off hiring a carpenter who
| already has the tools than doing it yourself. They can
| amortize the fixed costs over hundreds of projects.
| jefftk wrote:
| Hiring a carpenter is very expensive. The cost of tools
| is tiny compared to the cost of their labor.
|
| (I'm assuming that we're talking about saving money in a
| way that counts your own time doing something you enjoy
| as free.)
| rytis wrote:
| Exactly that. Top brand tools are expensive, but lower
| mid range these days is surprisingly cheap, and even for
| one off projects might "pay for itself". And they get
| cheaper. Labor costs are increasing. Obviously this comes
| with few caveats: a) you have to enjoy what you do, so
| the labor is free and you treat the time as me-time and
| b) you actually know what you're doing... running in to a
| disaster and then getting someone to fix it can be very-
| very expensive :)
| jjk166 wrote:
| A carpenter charges like $50/hr. A tablesaw alone would
| likely set you back more than the labor for some simple
| shelves. Then they can get better deals on material, they
| do higher quality work, and they do all the parts that
| aren't fun, like cleaning up at the end.
|
| Also your time still has value even if you enjoy what
| you're doing. You could be doing other hobbies you enjoy
| more, or other aspects of the same hobby, or making money
| so that you could afford other opportunities instead. You
| may enjoy woodworking enough that you're willing to
| forego the value of that time to pursue it, but that
| doesn't make it any more economical.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| Yeah, GP really should have prefaced this with _hobbyist_
| woodworker delimma, because it did ring true for me as a,
| well, hobbyist woodworker, but it is definitely no where near
| true for professional woodworkers, joiners, cabinetmakers,
| furniture makers.
|
| For them, there is no "end" even when completing a build.
| There's simply just the next client to tend to.
| neogodless wrote:
| No disagreement really.
|
| I view it from my perspective as a hobbyist. I enjoy being in
| the shop working -- and I enjoy making stuff like my work
| bench, my saw tables and dust shields, my French cleat
| shelves, etc. I don't really expect to save money (if I do
| the numbers) so much as I expect to get more out of the
| process (skills, tools, etc.) than what I get buying
| something off the shelf.
|
| And yes - a _professional_ most likely values their
| productive time over time spent making jigs, etc. so they
| will often allocate capital wisely to save time!
| manachar wrote:
| There's something amazing/odd/horrifying about a world where
| it is generally no longer cheaper to do anything yourself.
|
| I love to bake and cook. I can do so fairly frugally.
|
| A supermarket frozen pie is still gonna be cheaper than
| anything I can make, especially if I count my time.
|
| It's a benefit and goal of the modern global industrialized
| supply chain, but I cannot help feel that making me work a
| full time job to buy cheap things means we don't put enough
| economic value on people making things themselves.
|
| Then again, I like not having to mine my own lithium, copper,
| etc. to get a computer.
| giovannibonetti wrote:
| There is a middle ground between doing it yourself and
| buying industrialized food. In Italy, people really value
| food produced locally. There is even a slogan for it
| "kilometro zero", which means "buy food close to the
| source".
|
| No wonder food tastes way better in Italy than in the US
| (in general), for example.
| dwaltrip wrote:
| It's not a bad thing by to make something yourself even if
| it costs more. The joy of making it is valuable. As well as
| the knowledge that your are a little more self-reliant.
| xmprt wrote:
| I think what you're worried about is the death of ownership
| and how people are increasingly starting to either sell
| their information or rent the things they need.
|
| Being able to buy things for cheaper from elsewhere is just
| specialization and it's one of the first things that
| brought humans from the store age to more modern
| civilization.
| masklinn wrote:
| > There's something amazing/odd/horrifying about a world
| where it is generally no longer cheaper to do anything
| yourself.
|
| How? It's pretty much the point and purpose of
| civilisation, to say nothing of industrialisation.
|
| > we don't put enough economic value on people making
| things themselves.
|
| The invisible hand is a middle finger. Always has been.
| cuddlybacon wrote:
| > > There's something amazing/odd/horrifying about a
| world where it is generally no longer cheaper to do
| anything yourself.
|
| > How? It's pretty much the point and purpose of
| civilisation, to say nothing of industrialisation.
|
| Civilization isn't necessary for this to be true. It is
| even true in small scale societies. You can observe this
| whenever they get cutoff from each other: they end up
| technologically regressing. It is more expensive to do
| everything themselves, so they end up losing access to
| technologies.
|
| The world where this was last true was when the common
| ancestor of us and neanderthals were still around.
| bishoprook2 wrote:
| "This article makes me think of the woodworker's dilemma."
|
| I'll definitely say that this applies in the car hobby.
|
| It's a helluva lot more fun to arrange a garage than to pull
| out a transmission.
|
| In terms of software, and this is perhaps just my age (and
| industry) showing, but it would be interesting to set up a shop
| that used only simple/traditional make files, gdb/gcc, simple
| text editors, extremely simple source control, waterfall
| design.
|
| It wouldn't work at Google but you sure can get wrapped up in
| building the garage at smaller companies.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Eloquently put.
|
| I think the woodworkers dilemma is a thing from the dev
| perspective. But, that still doesn't deal with the software
| users' side. Why does a modern company need _more_ people in
| accounting, HR, even management? Shouldn 't the ability to
| email everyone, digitized forms and such make fewer people
| necessary to do the same job?
|
| If Mcdonalds invents a new sandwich maker that requires half as
| many cooks per burger...
| citizenpaul wrote:
| The purpose of HR is to protect from liability and regulation
| violations which gets harder the bigger the company
|
| The purpose of accounting is to prevent stealing, fraud,
| regulation violations and taxes. All which get harder the
| bigger you get.
|
| The more of those people you have the more managers you need
| to oversee them.
| dalbasal wrote:
| ..and computers don't help?
| sytse wrote:
| I couldn't agree more. We see it all the time that companies
| spend a ton of time and money on top of their tools. We call it
| DIY DevOps https://about.gitlab.com/DIY-DevOps/ and frequently
| see a big saving when moving to a DevOps Platform.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| Like Hal fixing a light bulb (42s watch):
|
| https://youtu.be/AbSehcT19u0
| heisgone wrote:
| This is all true. That being said, it's not completely a bad
| thing. We have to accept that different people are motivated by
| different things. To run a business, you need both people
| motivated by money and people motivated by building things.
| People only motivated by money we work in marketing and
| management but don't have the mindset necessary to build the
| stuff they want to sell. So you get people motivated by
| building things to help. The trick is getting all those people
| to work together.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| But can you imagine how much better the world would be if we
| didn't run businesses and didn't need the people motivated
| only by money at all?
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Not any better? The allocation of finite resources is best
| done with money.
| LeSaucy wrote:
| As a software engineer who loves this type of stuff I'm
| thrilled someone's willing to pay me exceptionally well to do
| it. It's unfathomable to think of a company having 3-4
| woodworking teams each with different shops, tools, jigs etc.
| scooble wrote:
| > It's unfathomable to think of a company having 3-4
| woodworking teams each with different shops, tools, jigs etc.
|
| Not really, depending on the company. Building something
| complex, like a house, could require at least carpenters,
| joiners and cabinet makers, which are quite different jobs.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I'm definitely guilty of that. I should focus on some of the
| copy-paste-edit work to add support for half a dozen
| configuration modules, but I'm still mentally in the building
| scaffolding phase, also because for each module I will need to
| add some functionality (versioning, revert, import, etc).
| swiley wrote:
| Sometimes I feel like the complexity introduced by those tools
| results in _less_ productivity. When that happens this weird
| cycle forms where more and more developers are hired to manage
| the ever changing interfaces used by internal tools which
| results in more churn.
| eadmund wrote:
| > When that happens this weird cycle forms where more and
| more developers are hired to manage the ever changing
| interfaces used by internal tools which results in more
| churn.
|
| The Node ecosystem leaps to mind. To a much lesser extent,
| the Python ecosystem.
| gpspake wrote:
| relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/1319/
| saeranv wrote:
| Woah, I didn't realize I do this, but this really resonates. It
| seems to me that one "hack" to break out of the tool
| development cycle is to iterate chairs. If it's iteration
| itself that is intrinsically pleasurable and addictive, then
| perhaps simply switching what you iterate on can switch you
| onto a more productive path, without the usual
| resistance/procrastination that accompanies work.
| saalweachter wrote:
| It's a useful thing to ask yourself periodically -- at work or
| "play", programming or woodworking -- "Wait, what am I actually
| trying to accomplish/build here?".
| abc_lisper wrote:
| This is actually ideal when they don't overdo it. OTOH you have
| teams that don't give shit about engineering, rarely apply any
| thought and push work around. What should take a week takes a
| year, because engineers don't take joy in their work, don't
| spread knowledge around, learn quickly from others etc leading
| to Dilbertian managers who want butts in seats, have War rooms
| to get work done.
| bob33212 wrote:
| This happens even more outside of creator roles. Process people
| invent processes and then that requires other processes to
| check those processes, and so on.
|
| Then you are in a situation where just buying a product in a
| way that hasn't been done before, like from a foreign country,
| can take months to accomplish because all of these processes
| were created without that situation in mind.
|
| A real world example of this is the DHS, EFiMS. By the time
| that they are able to complete all the process, the product
| they are trying to buy is no longer within the necessary specs
| and they start all of again every 4 years.
| https://fcw.com/articles/2020/10/06/dhs-financial-modernizat...
| SimianLogic2 wrote:
| Are you a game developer?
|
| (brb writing a new engine)
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| This was exactly me when I was big into video game emulation. I
| would spend 90% of my time hunting down rare roms and then
| categorizing them, testing them, ensuring that they were valid,
| etc and only 10% of my time playing the games. On top of that,
| the vast majority of the games were barely worth playing at
| all.
| tyingq wrote:
| This effect gets worse in a large organization, where
| eventually you get a named group with a leader for every
| possible sub-specialty or task. Human nature, then, is to grow
| (or at least preserve) the size of your group. So you end up
| inventing projects and work that keep your group busy, rather
| than ceding people to other groups that actually need more
| help. There's also a tendency to create mandatory process that
| forces other groups to engage with your group (forms,
| approvals, reviews, etc).
| analog31 wrote:
| People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for
| merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a
| conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to
| raise prices. - Adam Smith
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Short term focus within companies drives cost control and growth,
| not productivity gains.
|
| The growth is the gremlin. Companies achieve monopoly/cartel
| status and they optimize for rent collection, which is the
| opposite of productive.
| roenxi wrote:
| That is a graph of _US_ TFP. I expect that once Asia is included
| in the mix the change will be a bit more pronounced. Most of the
| hardware related change in the IT revolution is happening there.
| The S &P 500 rank 1 company (Apple) would look to an alien like
| an Asian company since all the actual manufacturing happens
| there.
|
| Also, while I don't think it is necessarily the major driving
| factor, the US has a capital misallocation problem. People keep
| sinking fortunes into companies with bad profit margins.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Also, Total Factor Productivity will include the effects of
| everything a society does that can be measured in monetary
| terms.
|
| Dumping poison in rivers would probably show up as an
| "efficiency gain" at least until it causes ecosystem collapse
| and widespread illness and death, similarly so would
| clearcutting forests.
|
| I would expect at least some attempt to ground the claim in
| something real before leaping to a headline grabbing "computers
| aren't productive" (except for that bit when the productivity
| went up faster than previously) conclusion.
|
| For starters, do we care about TFP (the article implies we do)
| and if so has whatever we predict it to provide as a benefit
| also followed a similar graph? If not, then who cares if
| computers or anything else makes the graph go up.
|
| Secondly, how can we tell if computers have made it shoot
| upwards, but some other unconnected change has mostly negated
| that impact.
|
| It all feels very shoddy.
|
| The first time this came up in economics neatly lines up with
| when the graph suddenly changes direction upwards:
|
| "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the
| productivity statistics." Solow, 1987
| kazinator wrote:
| Software is mostly a management technology. But there is all
| sorts of automation: CNC machines, industrial robots making
| stuff.
|
| I think that a graph of "total factor productivity in the USA" is
| misleading without looking at factors like, say, how much
| manufacturing has disappeared from the USA and gone overseas in
| that period!"
|
| You have to look at how much you're producing with how many
| people; and that cannot be some per capita based on the
| population, but the actual head counts in those industries that
| are covered by that graph: what is the productivity with how many
| people?
| michael1999 wrote:
| Solid thinking. But I think the Jevons paradox deserves a
| mention. How much of our expanded capacity is spent on
| intangibles like extra complexity that doesn't show up in GDP?
| li2uR3ce wrote:
| > While software improves through better tooling and faster
| hardware
|
| In my experience faster hardware leads to worse software. I'm
| doing the same things I've always done on my "smart" phone but
| apparently the same sized text messages now need more phone. Good
| god, ICQ from 2000 had more user facing features than texting
| apps and that was running on Windows-swap-everything-
| unconditially.
|
| Yeah, much software development time is spent on invisible
| "features" that aren't relevant to the poor bastards that will
| have to use it. It makes the case for the more vertical in-house
| software development. There's much less push back to specialized
| features which often aren't nearly as specialized as the outside
| developer thinks it is because of absent understanding of the job
| fortified by arrogance.
|
| But even when the job is well understood... display fucking words
| on the screen... I mean, come on! Why am I ever waiting 3 seconds
| after unlock for that?
| svachalek wrote:
| I've been in software development 28 years. Seems like we're
| writing the same stuff we always did, except now it's in a
| language virtual machine running in a container running in a
| hardware abstraction VM running on actual hardware in the
| cloud. Thanks to hardware advances, we can move exponentially
| sharper images, bigger files, more polygons, but the actual
| complexity of what software is doing is increasing at a slow
| linear pace. The biggest gains now are in horizontal scaling,
| we can now handle way more users in parallel than we ever did
| 10 years ago. But for most products that don't need to handle a
| billion users, it's at least as hard to produce a shipping
| product as it was 20 years ago.
| dexen wrote:
| I find the opening graph to undermine the central thesis a bit:
| the dot-com bubble burst in 2002, but is _barely_ reflected on
| the graph; the growth levels off in 2005 or 2006. If the change
| in productivity was largely software-moderated, I would expect a
| lager change around the dot-com burst. Meanwhile the large change
| seems to be the 2007 Subprime mortgage crisis - and presumably
| the follow-up change in interest rate and investment patterns.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Something I don't see addressed here is how much of software is
| an arms race. I think this reality is hidden a bit from people
| who have only ever worked on commercial software that exists for
| the purpose of creating economic value. A lot of software doesn't
| have that purpose and exists mainly for defensive reasons.
|
| I have spent most of my career working on fielding new software
| systems for the intelligence community and the DoD. We can't say
| we haven't seen productivity gains in the form of many processes
| being automated to the point we can scale them much larger and
| process much more data. But this isn't economic productivity. 60
| years ago, satellite imagery involved dropping film from the
| satellite on a little parachute and intercepting it before it hit
| the ground, developing the film, and deploying any improvements
| in imaging capabilities by launching a new satellite. Now we can
| do almost all of that with radio and software and we have
| virtually the entire globe covered, a near non-stop stream of
| imagery constantly being turned into possibly useful and
| actionable intelligence depending on what the interest is in
| knowing what is happening in that region.
|
| But in terms of what we're doing, much of it is economically
| purely a sink. We're monitoring foreign ports, known locations of
| military units, missile silos, to maintain the strategic
| advantage of not being caught with our pants down if anyone out
| there ever decided to launch a large-scale conventional attack. A
| lot of people would probably argue what we're doing is pointless,
| fighting yesterday's wars while losing today's. Maybe. I'm not
| really trying to make an argument either way for whether this
| activity is useful or not.
|
| But it's not increasing American economic output, and it's not
| intended to. But it is an incredibly expensive and enormous scale
| application of deployed software technologies. It's effectively a
| new category of cost for the world's major military powers. They
| now need to spend on maintaining an enormous development pipeline
| and operational environment for software capabilities that bring
| no economic gain, but just keep them from being overtaken by
| their enemies.
|
| You do see _some_ patterns like this in commercial software,
| especially in the real of information security. We may or may not
| be able to easily deploy huge force multipliers to make our
| workforces more productive, but then we find they have
| vulnerabilities in them and we 've exposed ourselves to a new
| kind of criminal taking advantage of that and extracting some of
| that value. So we devote more and more resources to securing
| these systems, often making them less efficient and more
| difficult to use in the process. We have to do it, because the
| added security is at least some of the time ultimately worth it
| due to the enormous cost of a breach. But it's purely defensive
| spending. You're not making your system any more effective at
| producing whatever it is your company produces that creates
| economic value. Often, you're making it less effective at doing
| that.
| Jensson wrote:
| Firstly, GDP is a bad measure of productivity. A pill that
| replaced all healthcare would reduce GDP by 15%, but I doubt
| anyone (even economists) would call that a catastrophe.
|
| Productivity has stalled mostly because people have already
| filled their needs, so it makes little sense to buy more.
| Basically everyone have the clothes they need, the food they
| need, the car they need, the computer they need, already. Screen
| entertainment and information is basically free nowadays. So no
| matter how much you increase productivity these sectors will
| remain mostly constant.
|
| What do people still buy? Housing, but that is mostly a
| competitive good, people spend as much as they have on housing
| and it is limited supply so prices just increases to whatever
| people can afford. Same thing with education, international
| flights and the free market healthcare with restricted supply you
| have in USA.
|
| Another thing is access to other peoples time. You can buy a
| person to clean your home or do your lawn or drive you somewhere
| or renovate your kitchen or provide a massage or other things.
| There is no way to significantly increase that productivity, it
| is mostly fixed.
|
| So personally I see no need to increase GDP (what he calls
| productivity) further. Not to mention that many things gets
| cheaper, a family buying a TV today gets a much better TV for the
| same amount of money as a family buying a TV 30 years ago. The
| main thing would be to automate tasks so you no longer need as
| much access to other peoples time, but that is mostly an unsolved
| issue for now. Automating information delivery worked great, but
| it didn't lead to increased GDP rather it lead to those products
| becoming essentially free to consume effectively making it
| useless from an economists perspective.
| mmarq wrote:
| > Firstly, GDP is a bad measure of productivity. A pill that
| replaced all healthcare would reduce GDP by 15%, but I doubt
| anyone (even economists) would call that a catastrophe.
|
| This is only true in vacuum. In the real world, if this pill
| totally annihilated the healthcare sector, a massive amount of
| resources would be freed and reallocated in other sectors.
| jldugger wrote:
| And the pill would cost a few dollars less than healthcare's
| lowest bid, not fall all the way to zero, at least until the
| generics step in.
| strgcmc wrote:
| > Productivity has stalled mostly because people have already
| filled their needs, so it makes little sense to buy more.
| Basically everyone have the clothes they need, the food they
| need, the car they need, the computer they need, already.
| Screen entertainment and information is basically free
| nowadays. So no matter how much you increase productivity these
| sectors will remain mostly constant.
|
| I know you are not being literal with your claims, but I just
| wanted to provide some data, so that others who read it will
| have some grounded context. Across several categories, there is
| a stubborn (and maybe surprisingly or not-so-surprisingly
| consistent) 10-15% of Americans who don't have many of those
| needs filled that you mentioned:
|
| - The official national poverty rate hovers around 10%, but
| there has always been much controversy about defining what that
| means and what the threshold should be:
| https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2020/demo/p60-27...
|
| - 32 million uninsured under 65 (the default age threshold for
| Medicare): https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/health-
| insurance.htm
|
| - 42+ million Americans face food insecurity:
| https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america
|
| - It should come as no surprise that many poor people cannot
| afford cars and hence rely on public transit more, but that
| public transit systems are woefully underfunded (or funded but
| misappropriated/delayed/etc.) in America. Because economic
| disparity is interwoven with racial inequality, this is not
| just an economic problem; suffice it to say that, no, not
| everyone in America has the car they need:
| https://www.urban.org/features/unequal-commute
|
| - The FCC reports large gains in the past 5 years for broadband
| and mobile broadband access, but this is baselined against a
| paltry and outdated 25/3 and 10/3 Mbps standard definition for
| "broadband speed" (trying living in a 25/3 Mbps household while
| remote-working, video conferencing, streaming Netflix, etc.):
| https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-21-18A1.pdf
| Jensson wrote:
| Those 15% lacks those goods not because we can't provide them
| but due to how the country is run. If policies were changed
| so that those 15% got what they need then that would be a
| small one time bump in GDP and then lead to the same effect I
| described. Or possibly it would even reduce GDP, since now
| people would no longer have to fight over the 85% of spots
| that provides what they need to live a good life. For
| example, if regulations around healthcare was changed to make
| it much easier to become a doctor and start clinics greatly
| increasing the supply of healthcare providers, then the extra
| competition might even reduce the overall costs of healthcare
| to similar levels as other countries reducing total GDP even
| though value delivered to consumers was increased.
|
| Anyway, the point is that USA intentionally keeps 15% in a
| bad state in order to motivate people to not be a part of
| that group. There is no need to do that, many other countries
| doesn't. But keeping people poor doesn't seem to hurt GDP,
| rather it seems like keeping a part of your people lacking
| like that increases GDP, making it an even worse measure.
| machiaweliczny wrote:
| This seems like pure lack of will, not resources to me.
|
| I feel that big productivity gains will be made once
| government software will be required to be open source.
|
| Also if some form of better organization/decision making
| emerges that blockchain space folks are working on. I feel
| currently economy is too much supply driven and if more
| people could securely "invest" into what they really want
| build it would really make a drastic difference (you can see
| that kickstarter or crowdfunding as an example but it's too
| prone to scammers)
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| Perhaps because mainstream software of today doesn't add much to
| what we had in 199x. There already were the same Word, Excel and
| e-mail those days - . (and I doubt live chats we have today can
| add much to productivity, well-thought and well-organized emails
| are better).
|
| It can be possible to boost productivity with something like Roam
| Research (especially used in collaborative mode) but it would
| require a lot of enhancements to it and a lot more work on
| teaching the people to use it the right way.
|
| Even people with skills to use Word the right way (i.e. use
| styles instead of ad-hoc manual font adjustments and extra CRs)
| or to use non-basic features of Excel are rare. Teaching (or even
| getting them interested) the masses something entirely new,
| requiring a new way of thinking and totally new workflow would
| probably require enormous effort.
| datavirtue wrote:
| We had live chat in the 1990s.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I disagree completely. I'm insanely more productive as part of
| a team than I was in 199x.
|
| Not even talking about things for software development
| specifically, but for general-purpose word-processing and
| spreadsheeting and scheduling, you've got:
|
| - Live collaborative cloud editing over mobile. The back-and-
| forth that previously might take a week can now be done in half
| an hour while you're in the back of an Uber in a different
| country
|
| - Googling how to accomplish spreadsheet tasks. Stuff that
| you'd just give up and not do before, or would take you days to
| figure out on your own, there are tons of blog posts and
| YouTube videos letting you get it done in half an hour
|
| - Tons of scheduling and information-gathering improvements.
| Looking at people's Google Calendars live to find a meeting
| that everyone can attend, sending a Google Form to collect
| lunch preferences rather than contacting people individually,
| and so on
|
| The productivity of modern administrative office tasks has
| _skyrocketed_ with collaborative, mobile, cloud-based tools.
|
| Getting stuff done _as a team_ with static Word and Excel files
| that were stuck on a physical computer at a physical office
| while you tried to decipher printed software manuals was
| _slow_.
| asdff wrote:
| On the other hand, for all of these points you could argue
| you aren't gaining all that much added productivity for the
| amount of compute power this all took vs the 1990s.
|
| - Live editing requires people to be working on the same
| thing at the same time, otherwise its back to back and
| forthing as people have different schedules and don't get to
| things right away.
|
| - Google has now gone to shit with basic search terms. Too
| often you end up in some longwinded article seeking another
| 10 seconds from you to pay advertizers before you back out
| and look for another. The web had a lot more signal and a lot
| less noise in the 1990s. I'd even reach for a book on excel
| today where I can quickly flip through (or ctrlf a pdf) vs
| waiting for a 15 minute youtube video to get to the point.
|
| - the scheduling improvements have costs, you now have to put
| everything and anything up on your google calendar lest you
| be scheduled for a meeting where you are "free" on the
| calendar but really working on something else. Invites for
| these sorts of meetings/zoomcalls/calendar events takes
| places over decades old email.
|
| Really the biggest productivity gain would be from going from
| a printed book to a pdf you could search. Everything else imo
| is sort of a wash or a massive waste depending on how you
| look at it with the compute resources being used to run that
| zoom meeting (that could just be a conference call like the
| 1990s).
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I am writing a book covering a lot of this ground (shout out to
| Roald Coase) - but I have a different (ish) conclusion.
|
| It's not going to be a few "software-friendly" companies like
| FAANG that eventually lead the charge and we see productivity -
| it's waaay longer term than that.
|
| My take is software is a form of literacy - and it will only be
| _when managers code daily_ that we will see enough of the control
| layers (model, monitor mentor) being actually software that
| software will show up in productivity stats
|
| If you like an analogy - steam engines used to power factories
| but there was one central engine and you spread out the power to
| other areas via bands / chains. Electricity came along but mostly
| replaced the central engine - it was not till people experimented
| with having power sent to many engines did the modern (Fordist)
| factory layout become feasible
|
| In short - everyone needs to learn to code
|
| or - if an SRE is what you get when you ask a coder to design a
| software development process, a _programmable company_ is what
| you get when you ask a coder to design a company
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| Coding is hard though. I remember helping a smart friend of
| mine with his homework in college for an intro CS course and
| even basic fizz-buzz type stuff was very hard for him. This is
| a guy who has had a highly successful career post-college and
| did well in his (non-technical) major. I'm skeptical that more
| than a small fraction of the population will ever learn to code
| at more than a superficial level.
| jasode wrote:
| _> Almost every recent A.I. advance has come from one tiny corner
| of the field, machine learning. Machine learning exposes a set of
| connected nodes, known as neural nets, to mass amounts of labeled
| real-world data in an attempt to give those nodes tacit
| knowledge. The breakthrough example was software that was able to
| identify cat pictures.
|
| >So far, these neural nets have given us some great demos but
| mostly niche real-world applications. We don't have self-driving
| cars quite yet!_
|
| What's the author's threshold for "real-world applications"?
|
| - Google's Youtube algorithm for recommendations uses neural
| nets[1]. So ~2 billion viewers being affected by it doesn't seem
| like a "niche" application.
|
| - Google language translation uses neural net[2]
|
| - Apple Siri voice recognition uses neural net
|
| It doesn't seem like neural nets are analogous to the joke that
| _" graphene is the wonder material that can do everything except
| escape the research lab"_.
|
| In contrast, deep learning neural nets have escaped the research
| lab and are widely used in production systems today.
|
| The author's blog post is recently dated August 2021 so it seems
| like he's not kept up-to-date on this topic since the
| experimental neural net winning ImageNet in 2012. Yes, that was
| an artificial contest but things have progressed quickly and
| there is real-world commercial deployment of NN trained models.
|
| [1]
| https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...
|
| [2] https://smerity.com/articles/2016/google_nmt_arch.html
| marcinzm wrote:
| Not to mention Google search uses neural networks for language
| parsing [1], social networks use neural networks for ranking
| feeds, etc. I'd venture to guess the author interacts with the
| results of neural networks dozens if not hundreds of times per
| day but simply doesn't realize it.
|
| [1] https://searchengineland.com/google-bert-used-on-almost-
| ever...
| nonameiguess wrote:
| The author didn't really mean "real world" here. That is a
| misnomer. The article is about explaining why productivity
| gains have slowed even in the face of better software
| techniques. Machine learning has possibly made YouTube more
| addictive than it otherwise would have been, but this isn't
| increasing aggregate economic output for the world. It's just
| concentrating ad revenue in Google accounts, where it used to
| be spread between many more content distribution platforms.
| themacguffinman wrote:
| > but this isn't increasing aggregate economic output for the
| world
|
| How is it not? Demand is increased as people want to consume
| more content, and supply has risen to match it. We have more
| creative & interesting content by more creators than ever,
| that's certainly a huge increase in overall economic output
| by any measure.
|
| If you want to make some separate point about how "this isn't
| good for society" then make it, the economic productivity
| benefits of YT are huge regardless.
| asdff wrote:
| I think you'd have to consider the productivity benefits of
| youtube relative to the productivity benefits of anything
| else. For instance, a customer goes on youtube for three
| hours and sees some advertisements or whatever. Pays
| nothing. Another customer goes to a local restaurant with
| some friends for three hours. Spends $60 on food and
| drinks. Of the two, what is better for the economy? I would
| wager spending disposable income within the local economy
| is better than watching advertisements for companies
| registered in Dublin or wherever has the lowest taxes.
| orolle wrote:
| I think the author wording is a little bit confusing. I think
| he want to point out, that narrow AI is used successfully only
| in (niche) applications with narrow purpose. Niche here is not
| about total market size.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Because GDP doesn't measure right. It measures dollars, not
| value.
|
| Take Google search, for instance. I can look up (approximately)
| all the information in the world, for free. That shows up in the
| GDP as $0, _because it 's free_.
|
| But what is Google search actually worth? Would your business,
| say, actually pay for it as a tool? Probably, at least for those
| of us who need Stack Overflow answers. Real value is being
| produced, but it isn't being measured because it is being given
| away. (Yeah, I know, ads. Search itself is still being given
| away. So is Linux and gcc and...)
|
| And does Google search help productivity? Yes. Does Linux? Yes.
| Does gcc? Yes. The ability to get all these things for free
| greatly expands the things you can do.
|
| Software is producing value. But because so much is being given
| away, the value isn't showing up in the dollar-based metrics.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| I'm not sure that we're measuring productivity correctly these
| days. Take AI, for example. Going from barely being able to play
| chess, to winning at Starcraft and Go and basically any game
| Google thinks is worth cracking is a huge, huge leap in
| technological capacity. What was the impact of the people that
| worked on these and related technologies on "productivity"? You
| can count apples. You can't really quantify DynamoDB or Rust on
| the economy.
|
| Now, _median_ worker productivity growth seems like it 's
| drastically slowed and I think we have real problems in the
| economy, but as everything started merging with tech it gets
| harder to see the full picture.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Oh we are measuring productivity correctly.
|
| How much more productive is an software engineer that uses Rust
| compared to one that uses, say, C/C++? That is to say, do I
| need _fewer_ software engineers to deliver the same product if
| they use Rust rather than another language?
|
| If the answer is "not really", then Rust does not increase
| productivity (I don't know the answer, btw).
|
| In general, I don't think that software as a tool made much
| difference to people's productivity in the last 20 years or so.
| The boost enabled by internet connectivity was probably over by
| ~2005.
|
| Since then not much has happened. Uber, Deliveroo, etc. are
| great for consumers but they don't increase the productivity of
| drivers: Drivers cannot drive faster or service more customers
| per hour, really, these are bounded by physical constraints.
| drdec wrote:
| If we counted goofing off as part of productivity, we might start
| to see the gains we expected.
|
| Put another way, while computers have made us more productive,
| the internet has made it much easier to not do our jobs while at
| work. I don't think it is a coincidence that the graph stops
| being as steep around 2005.
| pjmorris wrote:
| "VisiCalc took 20 hours of work per week for some people and
| turned it out in 15 minutes and let them become much more
| creative." - Dan Bricklin
|
| It's interesting to me that VisiCalc (1979) and its successors
| (Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel) undoubtedly made some key business jobs
| vastly more productive and yet software spreadsheets don't really
| make a dent in the productivity numbers. I'd argue that software
| spreadsheets are a 'management technology' as the article defines
| them, but that they are a counter to the article's claim that
| management technologies spread slowly. They've been widely
| adopted by businesses of all scales, starting from the
| introduction of VisiCalc.
|
| Because of this, I wonder whether we are measuring productivity
| properly
|
| [0] http://theinventors.org/library/weekly/aa010199.htm
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| Before we can have a meaningful discussion about this we really
| need to understand what this Total Factor Productivity graph even
| means. "In the U.S." implies that it's using GDP or some other
| nationwide measurement. So we're talking about software's impact
| on productivity in a system (a large nation) with many other
| forces at play. That makes the entire discussion a bit
| narcissistic don't you think?
| tibbetts wrote:
| The phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs also seems highly relevant:
| https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/
|
| If software causes soft cost savings (reducing the number of
| required people) the savings may not actually be realized. The
| internal feudalism of large enterprises protected by monopolistic
| moats means people resist headcount reductions. And since these
| large enterprises still employ the majority of people, they are
| over represented in the statistics.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| > Alienation Is Not 'Bullshit': An Empirical Critique of
| Graeber's Theory of BS Jobs
|
| > David Graeber's 'bullshit jobs theory' has generated a great
| deal of academic and public interest. This theory holds that a
| large and rapidly increasing number of workers are undertaking
| jobs that they themselves recognise as being useless and of no
| social value. Despite generating clear testable hypotheses,
| this theory is not based on robust empirical research. We,
| therefore, use representative data from the EU to test five of
| its core hypotheses. Although we find that the perception of
| doing useless work is strongly associated with poor wellbeing,
| our findings contradict the main propositions of Graeber's
| theory. The proportion of employees describing their jobs as
| useless is low and declining and bears little relationship to
| Graeber's predictions. Marx's concept of alienation and a 'Work
| Relations' approach provide inspiration for an alternative
| account that highlights poor management and toxic workplace
| environments in explaining why workers perceive paid work as
| useless.
|
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170211015067
| thescriptkiddie wrote:
| It should be noted that David Graeber was a marxist and 100%
| agreed that bullshit jobs are a symptom of alienation of the
| worker.
| [deleted]
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Because productivity doesn't care about how people value their
| time.
|
| Is it more productive that I can watch 20 hours of high-quality
| TV every week?
| agomez314 wrote:
| Interesting read that harkens back to my econ days. I agree with
| the author based on my experience that digitizing a process often
| requires the developer to know the system better than the person
| who operates it - due to the nature of programming. I wonder if
| AI is really the way to transform software development into a
| General-Purpose-Technology. Codex is showing the way, in a niche
| and gimmicky way, but such is the way that many great ideas
| start. It's really hard to know though if _this is it_ or if it's
| merely another invention in a long line of inventions that failed
| to make it.
|
| Sometimes it just seems like we are swimming in a sea of code
| with no apparent gain. Incredible to think that people managed
| the construction of Pyramids, Cathedrals and awesome
| constructions with nothing but papyrus, ink, leather straps and
| good ol' memory. I can't even remember the function arguments for
| fs.read!
| tintt wrote:
| I still think that software in general does show up in
| productivity trends. Take a look at nineties on the chart in the
| article, this productivity surge can easily be attributed to
| spreadsheets, text processor and other software innovations that
| became ubiquitous in that period of time. It's also true that
| niche software is hard to make right, but then again, take a look
| at Amazon -- its crazy efficient logistics is based on the custom
| software and it seems to work fine for them.
| beefman wrote:
| My family watched Miracle on 34th Street a couple years ago.
| Aside from being generally impressed with how well it's aged, I
| was particularly impressed with the office technology on display
| (pneumatic tubes etc).
|
| In Victorian London, mail could be posted up to 12 times per
| day.[1] That's about as often as e-mail can be turned around.
|
| Bronze Age merchants exchanged clay tablets with remarkable
| throughput.[2]
|
| On the consumer side...
|
| _I live in Silicon Valley. My grandparents had better access to
| services than I do -- fresh milk delivery, an MD that came to
| their bedside, and an electric trolley -- in the 1930s in a town
| of 12k ppl. My grandfather was a driver for a laundry service, my
| grandmother taught piano._ [3]
|
| But maybe the most fundamental issue here is that productivity is
| 'measured' by dividing GDP by hours worked. But work seems better
| characterized as a mechanism that distributes, rather than
| creates, GDP.[4]
|
| [1] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/24089/victorian-mail-
| del...
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRcu-ysocX4
|
| [3] https://twitter.com/clumma/status/1297571626901331968
|
| [4] https://twitter.com/clumma/status/835581829654536192
| smoldesu wrote:
| A lot of those jobs ultimately became redundant for people.
| Milk delivery makes no sense when you can choose your bottle
| down at the grocery store next time you're there. Bedside care
| became impractical as medical technology advanced, and electric
| trolleys are pretty cumbersome (especially alongside city
| streets).
|
| Eventually, we realized that we could cut out the milkman: we
| laid off a lot of people in the process, but I'm sure the ice
| deliverymen are thankful that they no longer need to haul 25
| pound bricks up New York staircases anymore.
| beefman wrote:
| Ice delivery is the only valid example of a reduntdant job
| here. My grandparents bought milk at the grocery store, too.
| And I get milk delivered with Instacart. Medical technology
| did not make bedside care impractical. Quite the opposite.
| _More_ can now be done from the bedside. Not that a typical
| doctor 's visit involves any meaningful use of technology. Of
| course there are many other reasons why bedside care is
| superior.
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