Productivity has fallen, and experts are puzzled. I’m not. We’re all just tired

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2022-11-03/worker-productivity-has-fallen-and-experts-are-puzzled-im-not-were-all-just-tired

by SonOfKyuss • 4 years ago

137 204 4 years ago

latimes.com

hellothere13372• 4 years ago

We are being gaslighted that there's an epidemic of quiet quitting when quiet quitting has been defined as "not staying on unpaid overtime". We're being told that remote work is killing America because inner city office rental properties have lost value. In the end however its just a way to manufacture consent for the inevitable layoffs that will soon hit the economy. The Federal Reserve stated explicitly that they will stop inflation by increasing unemployment because there are no other levers left.

slantedview5• 4 years ago

There are absolutely other levers left, the Fed just doesn't want you to know about them. Some large portion of inflation is being driven by unjustified price increases, price gouging, which is driving spectacular record profits in some sectors. Nixon arguably ended out of control inflation with price controls. The same could be done today. Another lever would be an excess profits/windfall tax.

Edit: As I see I'm already being downvoted let me just say: you can't complain about inflation, and the unemployment that's resulting from it, while ignoring one of inflation's key drivers and pretending nothing can be done about it.

deelowe• 4 years ago

How are they unjustified? In my world, our costs have gone up over 50%.

mountainb• 4 years ago

Nixon's price controls did not work. Saying "arguably" doesn't change that. Most reasonable people aware of the history of the 1970s would expect more thorough support for such a controversial assertion. It's like saying "Pol Pot was arguably one of the 20th century's greatest humanitarians." If it's arguable, let's see you argue it.

vaidhy• 4 years ago

I think these levers are more of a fiscal policy than monetary policy. Fed does not have the levers, but the government and fed together have the levers. I always felt that the independent central bank is pretty artificial and used as an excuse.

But I am in complete agreement with you on the point you made. Why are we treating profits as untouchable? If labor and cost of goods go up, maybe profits should go down before passing the cost to consumers? I suspect the answer is not very pleasing for many people.

Aunche• 4 years ago

the Fed just doesn't want you to know about them.

First of all, the Fed doesn't have the power to implement price controls or levy taxes. Also, why do you think they don't want you to know about them? Janet Yellen, our last Fed Chair, is pushing towards higher taxes, she's part of the administration pushing for a windfall tax.

Nixon froze wages along with prices, so it's ironic that you're using him a positive example.

com2kid• 4 years ago

because there are no other levers left.

That the government is allowed to use.

Cost of living in cities is sky high, rent and property prices are a huge part of that. The solution, rezone and build crap tons of housing, is politically untenable due to a vocal minority.

Increasing corporate taxes, or just taxes in general on the upper brackets, another lever that isn't available in the current political climate.

hellothere13372• 4 years ago

Yup someone has to foot the bill for the reckless policy dictated over the past few years. And as it was in 2008 the middle class will pay for it again.

svachalek• 4 years ago

I agree with the solution but I don't think it's a minority stopping it. Even the people who can't afford housing don't want to do that, they just want a 4 bedroom house with a big backyard that magically costs a lot less.

itronitron• 4 years ago

They're setting up the narrative to deflect blame from Wall Street to the general public for the impending market correction.

Loughla• 4 years ago

What we don’t need is a bunch of people wondering why we’re being less productive in the workplace as if the answer weren’t right in front of them.

Honestly, all of the 'productivity is down' and 'quiet quitting' PR spin articles from everyone from Fox to CNN to NPR have made me realize that either the people who have wealth and control media are completely disconnected from my reality, or, are absolute sociopaths.

Legitimately, everyone in my life is exhausted. They're exhausted by covid, inflation, war, politics, violence, whatever it is. They're exhausted. It's all too much, and it's all running together.

I believe we are on the edge of a massive social upheaval. No idea what will happen or what will set it off, but I do believe that.

conductr• 4 years ago

I think it's more that we ignore common sense a lot as a society and only believe things that are empirically backed by data and have been published in a journal somewhere with reproducible results that can be cited.

This is essentially the "no shit" answer from the author. I would be lying if I said it wasn't also my initial thought to the productivity news when I read the headline recently.

pyrolistical• 4 years ago

either the people who have wealth and control media are completely disconnected from my reality, or, are absolute sociopaths

Why not both?

dfxm123• 4 years ago

the people who have wealth and control media are completely disconnected from my reality, or, are absolute sociopaths.

This is a response to an article in the Washington Post (that was discussed earlier here): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33405389

The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos. It's clear what's going on here. The corporate backed media is trying to convince Americans that their compatriots are lazy, quelling support for expanded workers' rights/compensation. That this is happening so close to an election may not be a coincidence. In my neck of the woods, I see ads in support of candidates who label their opponents' supporters as lazy & unwilling to work.

kjkjadksj2• 4 years ago

We are too exhausted and disconnected from eachother in real life to organize a revolution. This is by design.

slantedview5• 4 years ago

The fact that real wages have been stagnant for decades and productivity gains all go upwards could be a factor here.

FollowingTheDao3• 4 years ago

Yup.

https://www.cbpp.org/sites/default/files/styles/report_580_h...

biggerChris• 4 years ago

I gave up working hard when I turned 24 years and my friend passed away due to an alcohol battle.

Since then, I realize working long hours; countless hours wasted at night solving and fixing issues isn’t worth the time on earth.

Working hard and looking like a 40 year old man when I was 24 years old. I started to see gray hair show.( I’m not exaggerating, I looked like shit) 3 years ago, gray hair was showing.

Not worth it being called “ the main man”

Not worth it.

yrgulation9• 4 years ago

Yet people want to either spend extra hours commuting or working to pay expensive rents in crowded stressful cities instead of embracing remote work and actually enjoying life after work hours. Remote work should be an employment right where possible for those of us who know whats up. That way you are less stressed and more productive.

ianbutler• 4 years ago

Have you considered some people don’t like remote work? It’s not like it’s an unbridled good, that’s just your opinion on it.

I have to pay more to have an office, never see anyone from my team except for a few off sites a year and a sync communication is way lossier than in person.

I miss my commute, 30 minutes each way on a train — it was my reading time. Now I don’t read, work or something else fills the slot.

The commute also provided a hard boundary, both mentally and physically at the end of the day from carrying work home with me.

I prefer that the job enforce all of these boundaries and not that I have to reimplement what I had gotten for free this time with my own mental effort to make these new boundaries.

yrgulation9• 4 years ago

And thats fine - what i am saying is that it should be a right not a requirement. As opposed to what onsite workers demand, that we all return to offices.

coding123• 4 years ago

Years ago I rented a desk for additional contracting work I was doing at a shared work space. I think it was called Nedspace when I was in Portland. Many companies going remote offer this, will pay for your monthly spot.

Personally, these days at the age of 42, I prefer working remote.

spookthesunset4• 4 years ago

Same boat. Totally miss the socialization. I hated having to steal part of my living space to make an “office”. It is so isolating. But I live in an apartment, which unlike the “huge house in the country” crowd doesn’t lend itself to making an office. Especially with a kid.

Sure I could move to some huge house with a fancy office but that just seems wrong to me. Density is the only way only of sprawl and inefficient resource use. But density makes it kinda hard to have a two bedroom, one office apartment. It also becomes rather depressing.

I dunno man, the chips are gonna fall on the table sooner or later. Lots of people working in the tech industry completely lost their mind over Covid and I suspect there is a lot of healing that people need to process. I don’t think people are working with their whole brain yet…

ImprobableTruth• 4 years ago

I miss my commute, 30 minutes each way on a train — it was my reading time. Now I don’t read, work or something else fills the slot.

This argument is absolutely insane to me. You weren't paid for your commuting time before - if work now fills that slot it's because you're choosing to work earlier/more.

taeric3• 4 years ago

This doesn't feel well reasoned, to be honest. I suspect remote work can work really well for a lot of people. I also suspect it is probably not the panacea folks make it out to be.

Your comparison to "crowded stressful" cities is also kind of amusing. There is nothing inherent to cities that requires they feel stressful or over crowded. No more than it would be valid for me to say "barren and empty towns."

And remote work is a bit of a right, already. If you are truly as productive as you think you are, it will be somewhat easy to convince an employer to take that offer.

yrgulation9• 4 years ago

Its not i that needs to reason why as of 2022 remote work should be a right and not perk handed out by benevolent employers. It is you who should reason as to why we need to sit in offices for hours a day given all the modern tech and communication skills.

qull• 4 years ago

Most work cannot be done remotely. You are in a tech bubble. A majority of people have to be present to do things.

yrgulation9• 4 years ago

Unfortunately you are right, and that's why i said where possible. Also i didn't say mandatory. Even in tech not all jobs can be done remotely. And thats fine. But demanding that everyone should work onsite is frankly a mental health issue.

hindsightbias• 4 years ago

If there are no actual measurements to back up the last two years of HN WFH productivity anecdata, then perhaps there is something about bifurcated work and home environments.

For many, with WFH there are no after work hours. Work-Life Balance is a lie, it’s Work-Life Integration.

yrgulation9• 4 years ago

Plenty of measurements - the most accurate being record profits while people worked remotely. Cleaner air, rivers and streets are also well known to have happened while people worked remote. Basically, other than rents going down and restaurants and shops closing there is little data on why remote work would be negative.

chasd00• 4 years ago

for WFH you have to be disciplined or, yeah, you end up with Work-Life Integration. I won't go into specific techniques or ideas but you have to be very disciplined with yourself when working from home. If you're not then you either start slacking off and eventually get fired or work just becomes all consuming 24x7 and you have a worse work-life balance than when on-prem.

jspaetzel• 4 years ago

Workers understand inflation and they're working less because they're being paid less.

yucky3• 4 years ago

...and then complain they don't have enough money for <insert thing here>

point_blank• 4 years ago

Productivity has fallen

The alternate, potentially more honest, statement should be that productivity hasn't increased at the same rate as it did in the past. I'm not the only employee who has realized that working harder year after year isn't physically or psychologically sustainable, and is rarely (if ever) rewarded.

Someone is angry we're not working hard enough.

jldugger• 4 years ago

The alternate, potentially more honest, statement should be that productivity hasn't increased at the same rate as it did in the past.

The more honest statement is that productivity always grows going into a recession and falls going out of one. This is a known pattern[1] emerging from the marginal response of firms: the least productive workers, on a profit per hour basis, are laid off first. And the last to be rehired. So in a recession, average productivity goes up alongside unemployment. And as hiring ramps up out of a recession, the opposite happens.

Unfortunately, the COVID recession was partially imposed on the economy, and so whatever natural cadence the business cycle possesses is overlapping with the next recession. So in a few months we'll likely see stories about productivity increasing again.

edit: I just want to make a point that low productivity doesn't mean bad. Bad productivity is _negative_. Low productivity is just much closer to the "hurdle rate" that capitalists use to determine whether to fund projects, making the jobs riskier than the typical 30% margin SaaS products the HN crowd is most familiar with.

[1] http://www.economicpolicyresearch.org/images/docs/research/e... (the first citation i could find, not nessecarily the best)

xxpor• 4 years ago

This was extremely true during the initial wave of covid too: productivity shot up a TON, because the people who were laid off were in inherently low productivity sectors like restaurants, theme parks, etc.

fsckboy• 4 years ago

and is rarely (if ever) rewarded

productivity growth is always rewarded, it leads to more goods at lower prices across the economy, so everybody's standard of living goes up. This is a very real effect; consider how small percentages of inflation cause pain throughout the economy, the same pain is produced through productivity drops.

jgust• 4 years ago

There is the impression that this is no longer true - capital owners are capturing the increased productivity as profit and "everybody's standard of living" is remaining the same or eroding.

Moissanite3• 4 years ago

"Past performance may not be indicative of future results. The value of your economic model as a predictor of outcomes may go down as well as up."

mysterydip• 4 years ago

Remember when computers and automation promosed to give us all this free time? Turns out it just meant companies could pay one person to do the job of four.

shams932• 4 years ago

exactly!!!

aksss• 4 years ago

Well, TBF it gave three people more free time. Oh, you were expecting compensated free time??

pbourke• 4 years ago

Another formulation is that technology augments the impact that a single individual can have. The productivity gains allowed by silicon are the greatest single economic advance in human history. Businesses become increasingly more productive to the degree that they are founded on, or can reorganize themselves to be in alignment with, this trajectory.

I say this while sipping my morning coffee, browsing HN and waiting for an amount of computation to finish on a single machine that required either a supercomputer or multi-million dollar cluster 20 years ago.

antonf• 4 years ago

Isn’t it what economists would call a 4x increase in productivity? Isn’t fall in productivity mean that you now need more people to do same job?

FredPret• 4 years ago

I’ve grown more disillusioned with employment over time.

Whether I knock it out of the park, or slack off, I get pretty much the same outcome. Loyalty is not rewarded - see the recent layoffs.

Now, I’m not complaining, I just think maybe more people are waking up to the drawbacks of being an employee.

All my extra energy is now focused toward side businesses - as those start paying off, my contribution to GDP is likely to go way up.

RandomWorker• 4 years ago

People are retiring, work force is smaller, ergo network effects of productivity are smaller.

treis2• 4 years ago

This is just an artifact of the measurement process. Energy prices plus some global supply chain issues has spiked inflation. That makes (1) everything more expensive and (2) under measures output due to inflation adjustments.

Plumbers aren't plumbing slower than they were before. They look less productive because they have to spend more on gas. And the $100 an hour, or whatever, of economic output is discounted more than it should be because of how we measure inflation.

Barrin92• 4 years ago

The good people at the US Bureau of Labor Statistics are aware of this fact which is why their measurements are price adjusted. I always wonder whether people who make these comments think the people over there haven't taken a stats 101 class.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/prod2.nr0.htm

tqi• 4 years ago

They definitely make adjustments and I'm sure they are very smart, but given that the productivity and inflation charts change trajectory at about the same time, I think the it's reasonable to suspect it's a measurement artifact rather than everyone reaching a breaking point all at once?

fundad2• 4 years ago

unit labor costs take consumer prices into account but not the productivity number. Productivity is output divided by hours worked and there is no price adjustment described for the output number unless I missed something in that link.

Businesses may also be more staffed up than the same quarter a year ago.

Productivity is up over last quarter but down compared to the same quarter a year ago, when businesses were complaining about being understaffed (the enhanced unemployment ended in September of Q3 2021). Did the delta outbreak also depress hours worked and juice the health sector's contributions to GDP or hurt it because there are more profitable procedures?

All I can say is output is not adjusted for prices.

treis2• 4 years ago

Output is measured primarily as an index of product revenues, adjusted for price changes

https://www.bls.gov/k12/productivity-101/content/how-is-prod...

Adjusted for price changes being the key word.

The BLS isn't measuring the number of pipes plumbed. They're counting the dollars that plumbers make and using that number to determine their output. To compare that output across time you have to discount for inflation. If you calculate too high a rate of inflation then you discount too much

ianai• 4 years ago

Yes, the word recession seems less than appropriate currently. The universe is capable of far larger variety than our human vocabulary after all. Having been a first in 100 years pandemic, this last pandemic occurred without precedent in modern history. We probably don’t have a good model for what we’re going through and won’t for years or longer.

This Fed opinion piece has some great points related to your point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33394486

That author found much of the latest growth in profits attributable to reduction in corporate taxes and not much else. This latest might be a reversion to a market preference for lower P/E ratios. That would look like lower productivity even with the same earnings and thus actual productivity, a clear contradiction.

But be careful here. The next thing to write about after headlines of lowered productivity are lowered wages.

ElevenLathe• 4 years ago

This is an important thing to realize, which is that (almost) all productivity everywhere in the globalized economy is really just an arbitrage between energy and labor prices. For the past ~200 years, if you could find a way to do some job with less labor by burning coal or electricity, you would do it and keep the gains. This is because energy has been extremely (some would say artificially) cheap the whole time. The only way to keep productivity anywhere near 20th/early 21st century levels going forward will be to arrange for this cheap energy to continue.

fnordpiglet2• 4 years ago

That’s why I’m super long horse drawn buggies.

photochemsyn• 4 years ago

Good points. I'd add another factor: poor organization can crush measures of per-person productivity, not because individual workers are exerting more or less effort, but because of bottlenecks, duplication, and general mismanagement. One outfit can be running around frantically 24/7 trying to fix the latest breakdown, with resulting low productivity, and another can just be humming along, calm and relaxed, but more productive overall because their systems are better designed.

Case example: the airline industry took COVID bailout money and used it for stock buybacks, while laying off large numbers of pilots and other employees due to low demand for air travel at the height of the pandemic. As demand surged recently, more and more flights were canceled (~75% decrease in number of flights) and this created a huge revenue drop so technically, 'productivity per worker' declined. Layoffs resulted in a 'increase in per-worker productivity', but now, mnay airlines don't have the necessary staff to run their businesses smoothly, so their revenue is suffering, passengers flights are getting cancelled, and labor is calling for strikes.

Gross mismanagement 101.

moron4hire2• 4 years ago

I had a bout of post-viral fatigue syndrome after catching "something"[1] back in April. It felt a lot like my previous bouts with depression. It got me wondering if maybe "Long COVID" might be, in at least some part, an existential crisis, realizing that--despite masking, despite social distancing--one has very little control over one's own mortality.

[1] me: So it's not COVID and not the flu?

doc: Yeah, there's something going around.

me: So I just have "something".

doc: Yeah.

mschuster914• 4 years ago

Mighta been RSV, that shit is really nasty and obviously it won't register on flu/covid rapid tests.

spookthesunset4• 4 years ago

doc: Yeah, there's something going around. me: So I just have "something". doc: Yeah.

Back in the bad old days in 2019 this was the normal diagnosis you'd get for almost any respiratory virus. They'd tell you "it's viral and there really isn't much you can do besides rest it out".

What changed is we now have cheap "accurate" tests for exactly one specific flavor of virus that people are encouraged to take any time they get even an incredibly minor illness (or sometimes even no symptoms at all!)

Makes me wonder what would happen if you went to a doctors office and they'd test you for every single virus known to man. Lord knows the things you'd probably test positive for. People would never leave the house again!

moron4hire2• 4 years ago

It bugged me back then, too.

IDK. In my job, just fixing an issue isn't enough. I want to know what exactly happened to cause the issue, why it happened, and what I can do to prevent similar issues in the future. I want to know how pervasive the issue is, if it's just for some users or all users, if it's getting better or worse.

Seems like too much of how doctors are trained is "you're not paid to look any deeper than the bandaid."

FollowingTheDao3• 4 years ago

Humanity was faced with an existential crisis that woke them up to realize there is more to life than working to go buy stuff.

chitowneats2• 4 years ago

COVID-19 was nothing even close to an "existential crisis" for humanity. I would describe this level of hyperbole as "unbelievable", if it were not already so commonplace.

maxbond2• 4 years ago

I believe they meant existential in the sense of existentialism and not in the sense that it may have lead to extinction, given that they went on to relate it to one's attitude towards life (and we commonly refer to events that shake up our view on this as "existential crisis"), but even if that weren't the case I find it cavalier to dismiss this as "unbelievable hyperbole" and perhaps the reason you seem to encounter it so often is that there's more truth in it than you're willing to recognize. We don't know what the future holds or what directions the past could have taken; we don't know how bad COVID may have been if there were a different set of mutations or if war had broken out in Ukraine in January of 2020. I doubt we would have gone extinct, but to pretend it wasn't an incredibly dangerous situation is folly.

FollowingTheDao3• 4 years ago

"In psychology and psychotherapy, existential crises are inner conflicts characterized by the impression that life lacks meaning."

When you take away someone's everyday routine, for many, this takes away their meaning.

existential crises are not only about existence in physical form, but the ego existence as well.

You wold have read hundreds of articles about it during covid and not even remembered:

https://uthealtheasttexasdoctors.com/news/finding-meaning-an...

https://news.olemiss.edu/finding-meaning-and-resilience-six-...

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.6417...).

addingadimensio• 4 years ago

Wow imagine creating ai driven platforms that dominate our attention causing people to stare at their phones for 6+ hours a day in the name of progress and then being confused as to why people aren’t doing just more and more on top of more

strangattractor• 4 years ago

I spend all my time looking at Twitter and DoomScrolling. Not a surprise.

worldsayshi• 4 years ago

the measure of how much output in goods and services an employee can produce in an hour

That doesn't necessarily need to be related to worker efficiency at all? If we are measuring the output in monetary terms then inflation will bring it down?

flembat• 4 years ago

If you have been at work for a long time in the same kind of job role, you will notice that you do many more tasks than you used too, that you are expected to do more hours to cover gaps and the organization does not fully resource your team. The perks you had in your contract have been reduced and denied to new people. There is no staff canteen, no extra pay at weekends, every day is just part of the normal working rota. You will also see more computer automation and generally less people. So if the workers are working harder and smarter and more flexibly for less, I wonder where all that increased productivity was wasted and by who.

dumpsterlid2• 4 years ago

"I wonder where all that increased productivity was wasted and by who."

By the same people telling us inflation is happening because wages were going up/workers had more leverage, not price gouging by oil companies and such.

WalterBright16• 4 years ago

Inflation is caused by the government printing excess money. Not by gougers or union wage demands.

mschuster914• 4 years ago

I wonder where all that increased productivity was wasted and by who.

It was stolen by the upper classes and distributed to the stock markets, which exploded in value. There's numerous graphs outlining exploding stock markets, C-level payments or rents over the last decades, but wages have largely stagnated. And yes, a bit of the stock market increase is due to QE policy flooding the markets with money.

idlehand• 4 years ago

That makes sense if you think of things in purely monetary terms, the money was skimmed off and given to the 1%.

It doesn't make sense if you think of it in terms of the supply and demand of goods and services. If demand exceeds the capacity of society to produce and import, we get inflation and full employment. The US has had modest to high inflation and high employment for most of the last decade. So clearly there isn't an excess of goods and services, because if there is, sellers undercut each other for market share which keeps prices down.

The money going to the wealthy through capitalist exploitation is mostly removed from circulation, see the marginal propensity to consume. It ends up in the stock market, or bonds or such. Taking money out of circulation is deflationary and makes the rest of the money more valuable; fewer dollars chasing the same amount of goods and services means lower prices and more purchasing power.

Vaslo• 4 years ago

Salaried employees are a fixed cost. Just like we try to improve our production costs by absorbing it and spreading through more gallons/widgets, we do the same with our salaried employees. The piece that gets missed is often the useless work we do that is the real savings for the company. Instead we are not working later to get answers to some executive who demands them a day earlier than they really need them because we cut a headcount.

ozzythecat• 4 years ago

Instead we need to examine actual reality to find out how businesses can help their workers meet reasonable expectations. Blaming it on the millennials or work-from-home advocates or whomever is not the answer.

I am an armchair layman with no empirical data, but I think there are two truths.

For one, western capitalist societies are in a race to the bottom. Many “leaders”, out of ignorance or being outright sociopaths, care about nothing else except endless, unsustainable growth and optimizing financial metrics.

And second, the Information Age worker is realizing that working hard is not enough, getting a degree is not enough, that their labor is being exploited to make someone else rich, while workers can hardly afford housing. White collar? Doesn’t matter either. The “game” has changed.

And I think for the longest time, many were convinced that this exploitation was a thing of the past, and this generation has it far better. Suddenly, it’s as if people are realizing 1+1 isn’t 2 unless you’re born rich, incredibly lucky, etc., which for most people is a tough pill to slow.

Moissanite3• 4 years ago

Agreed. Feels like we are experiencing a "wealth dilation" effect; I have been able to greatly exceed the earnings potential of my parents, and yet the gulf between me and the executives I work for is unimaginably larger than it was for earlier generations - and still widening.

I spend a lot of time thinking about how this might be solved - getting rid of complex financial instruments and derivatives, making employee ownership mandatory or at least highly incentivized, banning digital advertising... I have to stop myself because of course none of it can happen; the people in power would never allow a change which dilutes their advantage. So, instead of trying to better my situation, I am stuck looking for ways to decouple myself from the world of work as much as possible. Quiet quitting and early retirement is about the best I can hope for right now.

techie6789• 4 years ago

This reads like typical top 1% B.S. My previous employer kept cutting benefits (401k matches, health premiums, health copays, coinsurance) and meanwhile magically the Head of Product is buying a 3M condo, the executive team is having 4 day "offsites" at Napa (when we have perfectly great conf rooms right here), and the CTO just got an M5.

It doesn't take geniuses to realize the money isn't being distributed equally. Yeah productivity has fallen -- it was the only lever regular workers have.

Why take on added stress when it doesnt turn into shared success?

The bosses want more for less. Politicians want to just import overseas labor (whom they treat as semi-slaves) so they can reduce salaries and working conditions for everyone ("work more or else i'll replace you with a lower paid H1 that I can abuse because they are desperate")

SHARED SUCCESS will magically fix productivity issues.

WalterBright16• 4 years ago

The bosses want more for less

Everybody wants more for less. Systems based on self-sacrifice don't work.

scottLobster4• 4 years ago

Actually they work great, so long as everyone shares in the sacrificing.

kelseyfrog5• 4 years ago

Systems where the perception of distribution is unfair don't work either - it disincentivizes people from participating. Many of us have a psychological reactance[1] reaction to such systems and no amount of trying to convince us that it actually is "fair" or that "everything is unfair" is going to change things.

The only solution to this psychological problem is the construction of systems where it's not possible for the person taking more to tell the people they are taking from to "get used to it."

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4675534/

commandlinefan• 4 years ago

political divisions so deep that we cannot agree that trying to hang the vice president is a bad thing

That kind of rhetoric isn't going to reduce political division. The opposite, in fact.

mistermann• 4 years ago

"Rhetoric" is far too generous - assuming the person is peaking honestly, it is well into mental illness (delusion) territory - although, all people suffer from this kind, so it is not classified as a mental illness, and is thus (in part) not considered not a problem worth worrying about (or a problem at all).

lkrubner• 4 years ago

Just for the sake of argument, I'd ask everyone to consider the counterfactual.

Let's talk about a normal year, for starters, to have a base to talk about. Suppose we have:

5% increase in nominal money supply

Which breaks down into 3 parts: population growth, productivity growth, and inflation.

So for example, in a normal year we might have:

1.5% increase in population

So that means we have 3.5% leftover that either has to be accounted for by productivity growth or inflation. In an average year we might have:

1.5% productivity growth

2% inflation

(There would actually be some small fractions here, but I'm simplifying the math because this is just a Hacker News comment. Feel free to work out the precise numbers yourself.)

Typically, we know the population growth fairly well, and we think we know the inflation number fairly well, so the estimate for productivity growth amounts to "Whatever we have left over after we subtract out the population growth and the inflation."

But what if we got inflation wrong? What if there were extraordinary events happening that make it more difficult to get an exact number on inflation? Then we would end up with a wrong productivity number.

If we overestimate inflation by 1% then we underestimate productivity by roughly 1% (qualifiers: not exactly, but good enough for this comment).

Remember, the inflation estimate is a weighted average of millions of products. A radical swing in one part of the index might have strange results, if the weighting is not exactly correct, or if the weighting relies too much on historical averages which are no longer relevant.

All of which is to say, we need to wait a year or two to know if this trend is real. It could just be a statistical illusion.

jgilias• 4 years ago

Ooooh, this is a pet peeve of mine! The productivity measure in economics is only tangentially related to how hard people work. Consider this, productivity is defined as the sum total of goods and services produced divided by total hours worked. If a company is highly automated, productivity will be higher than for a company in the same domain that is less automated. This has nothing to do with how hard employees work at either company.

Also, if the sum total of goods and services produced by an industry is not tightly coupled to hours worked, productivity will just fall with falling sales. So, if Google sells less of their GSuite subscriptions, but doesn’t do layoffs, productivity will fall. And this has very little to do with how hard individual Google employees work.

WalterBright16• 4 years ago

The Labor Theory of Value is discredited. Value is not based on how hard or long someone works, it's what is produced by the labor that has value.

For example, if you fill a bucket with water, run around in a circle, and empty the bucket, you are surely working hard, but exhibit zero productivity.

VancouverMan• 4 years ago

What's even worse for an economy is when "work" results in negative productivity.

Government bureaucrats are often an example of this. The "work" they do too often involves impeding productive private sector workers/organizations in some way.

Not only are these impeded private sector workers/organizations not doing their real work, but they're expending resources dealing with something that's usually quite irrelevant. That's on top of the tax burden they already face, which is being used to fund the bureaucrats that make these tax-payers less productive.

In the end, thanks to the "work" of government bureaucrats, less real wealth has been generated than otherwise would have been.

alfl• 4 years ago

Cribbing from Eric Weinstein: there are no labor shortages in (reasonably) free markets. There are just supply/demand mismatches, especially through the pricing mechanism.

Wages in real terms have been stagnant since the early-mid 70s. We probably, generally, need to pay workers more.

dumpsterlid2• 4 years ago

I love not being able to be self sufficient in my 30s because I get paid shit and then being told by the fed that inflation is being caused by people like me getting paid too much. I almost ended my life 2 years ago because of feeling hopeless about ever being able to earn enough money to have a decent quality of life that I could provide myself, I hate centrist democrats (i.e. republican-lite)

sidewndr463• 4 years ago

Ironically from what I understand in Germany the government claims the opposite is the problem: individuals save too much money. This has led to a requirement that all bank accounts have a negative interest rate, which effectively bans saving money.

sidewndr463• 4 years ago

To paraphrase that into a more easily understandable point: All construction companies bemoan the shortage of skilled welders willing to work long hours in remote locations for $12/hr without overtime pay.

yucky3• 4 years ago

Obligatory: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

knaekhoved• 4 years ago

What an embarrassing article, assuming it's not a parody. It reads like a caricature of the current female yuppie class:

"made me laugh until I cried. Then I put my face in my hands and screamed a little bit."

"we cannot agree that trying to hang the vice president is a bad thing, I am very, very tired of screaming"

"People are freaking tired, man"

"some of us could make banana bread, but medical and other frontline workers most certainly could not"

This is some upper-class woman who has a comfortable life and needs to invent problems to make herself feel alive. The entire article is basically composed of disjointed midwit bromides like the ones I've quoted above.

PragmaticPulp• 4 years ago

I feel like everyone I know has split into one of two groups: The first group is chronically online, perpetually consuming news, and increasingly isolated from the real world. The second group is sick of the constant sky-is-falling sentiment on social media and news media and has increasingly disconnected from their computers and phones.

The second group (more disconnected) is much happier on average than the first group (chronically online). The most chronically online people I know have gone through cycles of being convinced that Trump was going to cause nuclear armageddon to believing that COVID was going to kill or debilitate everyone they know, to thinking that economic collapse is imminent and nuclear war is inevitable, and so on and so on. It never ends, and as soon as one crisis fizzles out they're on to the next one within weeks.

The author of this article clearly fits that description. Here is her description of the pandemic:

During the early days of the pandemic, when we were all locked down and obsessively monitoring our sense of smell, there was nothing else to do but worry and work. Well, some of us could make banana bread, but medical and other frontline workers most certainly could not. And with so many businesses shutting down, the fear of being fired was real. Those who did not lose their jobs worked like hell to keep them; those who lost their jobs and then managed to find new ones did exactly the same thing.

Anyone paying attention to the job market knows that the COVID closure fears were real, but short-lived. The economy immediately swung in the opposite direction, with hiring sprees everywhere and wages being driven up spectacularly in response to the increased demand. Characterizing that period as "everyone being afraid of losing their jobs" can only be done if you view everything through a heavy filter of cynicism. It's like the positives disappear from memory and only the most negative things can persist.

That said, this is a real problem. People like to blame Facebook or specific social medias, but honestly websites like Reddit or smaller communities like HN are some of the most persistent in spreading this type of world-is-collapsing narrative. It drains people.

andy_ppp• 4 years ago

I imagine that productivity is also about investment? Someone with an EUV fabrication plant has more productivity than a person with a hammer. If we add in that new technologies make people more productive maybe we haven't had increases in these in sometime. What productivity increases could self driving cars create?

Looking at data I found here https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/productivity it does not look like there has been a real drop at all, just a jump for the past few years (why is this? initial WFH improvements during the pandemic?) that has dropped back to the same gradual historical increase. I think I'd like to see more analysis to be sure this is or isn't a real trend but I wouldn't worry quite yet.

rmah• 4 years ago

This may be a bit harsh but I feel the need to say it anyway... The posted article is, IMO, completely worthless. It's just rambling prose of how she feels bad and about things she considers problems with the world. With a few references to articles that echo her feelings tossed in. It all ends with a request for the world to empathize with her feelings. Not sure how that will help overall productivity or the economy, but I guess it'll make her feel better.

tagami• 4 years ago

I hope you're not in a management position

yucky3• 4 years ago

Somebody has to make sure shit gets done though, the world doesn't run completely on empathy. It's nice that people like this are privileged enough to live in a time where they can literally do nothing and expect others to consider their feelings at all times. What will they do when that world of comfort they've only known, goes away? How will they even function?

tayo424• 4 years ago

The US is a sick country. Keep working harder, but for what? Every time I feel like I get a step forward I get knocked back. Leave college into a recession, then get jobs that don't pay. Manage to get a software job and get ahead financially, then covid happens, save a ton for a house, then another recession, house prices and rent go up, now interest rates are to high now. Keep working, keep climbing, its not having results.

Some kid in Portugal was chatting with me about the US. He said never he'd never want to come here, to many guns, and we work way to much. Yeah we work our selves to death, in our suburban covered hell.

At least everyone I know is sick of work, corporate bull shit, sick of not getting ahead ever, and grinding away on meaningless tasks, we're all burned out.

seanw4447• 4 years ago

Why is everyone so scared of guns? They're machines. You should be much more terrified of other people driving.

tayo424• 4 years ago

i don't want to get off topic to much, but its because no where else has killing devices around they way the US does. I've heard this sentiment a lot when traveling.

mmastrac• 4 years ago

I think this is the question you need to ask yourself and understand.

newone2three• 4 years ago

I think (I _think_) maybe because they’re machines designed to kill people.

Just a guess.

Moissanite3• 4 years ago

Do guns also come with airbags and anti-roll cages to protect you from other people who don't know how to operate their gun safely?

sattoshi• 4 years ago

People fear what they don’t know, and the media pushing it as a partisan issue doesn’t help.

i_am_jl• 4 years ago

There are plenty of terrible drivers in Portugal and the US.

That's not true of a gun violence problem.

VincentEvans2• 4 years ago

Most don’t choose to interpret what they read in the most literal sense possible.

American gun culture scares even a majority of Americans themselves.

Incidentally we just concluded yet another trial determining the fate of yet another teenage shooter who committed yet another mass murder in yet another high school. Do we need to continue this debate?

nine_zeros3• 4 years ago

The difference is what is the primary utility of a gun vs a car. It is the primary utility that determines societal value.

dang2• 4 years ago

Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

tayo424• 4 years ago

how was this nationalistic or a flame war? The article is about US worker productivity, how can I not comment about the US?

scottLobster4• 4 years ago

N of 1, but I know my productivity has fallen, specifically at work. At home and on side projects nothing's changed, but I've come to the conclusion that my current job is enough to keep my family afloat, and that's all it will ever be. The implicit promise that's been around my entire life, particularly with those like myself making top 30% income/household by national standards, was that we could afford a decent house with decent schools and raise a family on just our W2 income. My dad provided for all four of us doing the 90s equivalent of my current job, and sure we didn't have cable and what vacations we took were all car-based, but my and my sister's college was fully paid for, we never wanted for necessities, and we had a 1700 sq ft house in a good school district.

Well, that is simply no longer possible on a single income, even a low six-figure one. To get the rewards I've busted my ass for thus far I have to look beyond my job. So unless economic circumstances change, said job is a 40 hour chore to keep the ship afloat while I spin up additional revenue streams. Outside of legitimate customer emergencies it will get all the commitment that my laundry gets (and my laundry is nicely folded). Any request for more better help me buy a house in a good school district or pay for my kids' college. I want nothing more than what my immediate Gen-X and Boomer co-workers have had for decades, and I'm sure as hell not going to lower my family's standard of living just to increase some middle manager's metrics.

JackFr• 4 years ago

My theory that I offer without evidence is that large scale fully remote work maintains (may even bump) productivity over the short term, but over the long term, in an economy with high labor mobility job switching in a fully remote environment exacts costs we’re now seeing.

Anecdotally as a manager who just started a role at a new company managing 2 teams whose members are mostly remote to different degrees, it’s been very difficult to get a sense of the teams capabilities, mood and load vs the book of work. It’s easy to ask questions and I want to keep everyone engaged, but I also don’t want to micromanage or give the impression of big brother looking over their shoulders.

cooldrcool3• 4 years ago

These guys are just asking for the guillotine.

Gravityloss• 4 years ago

We're also all doomscrolling, playing games, watching youtube, listening to podcasts or writing to hacker news. No wonder we're tired after doing all that! Have people lost the skill to unwind?

noipv4• 4 years ago

Covid injuries, Long Covid, Covid vaccine injuries, Layoffs, High interest rates, Inflation, Nasty employers; color me surprised.

sheepscreek• 4 years ago

..we need something, personally or collectively, to acknowledge the complicated and often conflicting experience of surviving a pandemic.
What we don’t need is a bunch of people wondering why we’re being less productive in the workplace as if the answer weren’t right in front of them.

Amen to both statements. We don’t need people questioning why isn’t the workforce being more productive - “why are they quiet quitting?” Because you worked your employees to the bone. And you still want more.

People are real - they have families. They need to live for something more fulfilling than a job that is always asking for more. We have been systemically deprived of our rights (no more unions, international employees being exploited with no real recourse, medical benefits depending on our jobs).

This is a modern form of exploitation of people by companies. Top brass makes disproportionate wealth. Their perks go up every year. Minimum wage gets a paltry increase. Or worse - stays flat.

Those in (or seeking) power want us to keep fighting over politics, so we don’t have the time to think for ourselves. No more.

Speak up everyone. For yourselves, your friends, your colleagues. Talk about how frustrated you are because your work doesn’t get that your child is sick and needs your attention and love at home. Or that you had a rough breakup. Or that you want to spend your 5 o’clock drinking with buddies, instead of attending a work meeting.

ryanmercer• 4 years ago

Not just tired but "worn out" or "fatigued" from 3 years of the stress of a global pandemic, the worry of an uncertain economy, the worry of a potential world war brewing, and then some have post-covid brain fog and/or other post-covid complications.

Just as we started to be able to cautiously gather and go out and do things, fuel prices skyrocketed and inflation started ramping up. We all just need a proper vacation.

chitowneats2• 4 years ago

We all need to learn to be a bit more stoic. The ride only gets bumpier from here in the medium term.

SteveMoody73• 4 years ago

Anecdotal for me, before the pandemic I was working in an open office and there was times that it was not a good environment when you need to focus, working from home work a bit improvement for me and still enjoying it now.

My case may be limited to a small group but I'm sure I’m not alone here. Productivity wasn't an issue working from home, I was designing electronics to completely revamp our product range in work. While everything up until this was focused on backwards compatibility, this was a clean slate project and give us chance to explore new tech.

Sue to the nature of our systems, there's many PCBs involved but the designs were going well and even had a few prototype boards built just before the Electronics shortages hit.

For most of the new designs we used the STM32 range as there were a lot available and plenty of options available. They seemed amongst the early ones that went out of stock. After that even just basic components just seemed to have dried up.

For almost 2 years now, most of my time has been spent keeping existing systems up and running, finding alternative parts or where that's not possible, redesigning boards just to keep production running. Some of these changes have been minor but had to change a Microcontroller on a couple of boards which also requires re-writing firmware for those boards.

It’s been a demoralising couple of years and while there's a thought that things should get better, there's no end in sight yet. When you get to the point that you're no longer enjoying the work, that's when productivity falls.

fundad2• 4 years ago

Productivity is low compared to the same quarter in 2021. Productivity was higher before the end of enhanced UI benefits because hours worked is the denominator. Just sayin’

Productivity has fallen, and experts are puzzled. I’m not. We’re all just tired

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