It's supply and demand - the supply of workers has doubled the last decades while demand has remained roughly the same. I think it's a miracle that salaries are so high currently.
Assuming that's true--and I'm not sure it is--mass retirement of baby boomers, which has already begun due to forced retirement during the pandemic, is going to absolutely decimate the labour supply, which has enormous knock-on effects (including a rise in inflation).
You can go back to the year 2000 and find Fox News and CNN talking heads warning us about the impending doom of baby boomers retiring and taking the economy with them. Any year now...
What has actually transpired in the meantime has been record breaking bailouts, corporate handouts, and profits, while workers pay remains in stagnation and housing market inflation goes through the roof (because of slow development, IMO, attributed to NIMBYism, mixed with a nationwide inability to build densely or build public transportation infrastructure).
edit/ And let's not forget, there have also been 2 disastrous, major wars, one of which inarguably never should have occurred.
> You can go back to the year 2000 and find Fox News and CNN talking heads warning us about the impending doom of baby boomers retiring and taking the economy with them. Any year now...
Yeah. And now it's happening.
Back in 2000 the average baby boomer was 35-55, far from retirement age.
The average baby boomer is now 55-75, and after COVID forced a ton of them out of the labour force, they're choosing not to come back.
See, you can report about a thing that's likely to happen in the future before it actually happens, and in the intervening period, while it may not be happening, that doesn't mean the reporting is wrong.
Or are you also one of those types that thinks the media was overblowing the whole global warming thing because they deigned to report about it before we saw some of the more dramatic and visible effects?
Frankly, I don't know what you're going on about in the rest of your comment. I made no claim that baby boomers aging out of the workforce explains All The Things. I certainly didn't make the claim that it explains trends in the economy up to this point. My point is that it's now a major factor in the economy going forward and we can expect major changes as a consequence.
It could also be a generalized disillusion in the system. I believe what pushed americans through for generations was the american dream. No american believed to be poor, they were all simply "future millionaires".
But what if people realized that it was only a delusion, that it can never be that everyone is rich, because then who would do the dirty jobs? There is no social pyramid without a base, this system is litterally designed to have a class of poor people forced to do shitty jobs to survive.
If you take away the hope of a wealthy future, there are no reasons left to slave away your life on a corporate ladder.
consider that small business people had done their daily things for thirty years, not been chatting on the Internet; many of those local biz people relied on walk-in customers, and many of those local biz people are part of the Boomer generation. Those people paid their bills and participated in the general economy.
At the same time, corporate outsourcing reached epic proportions, with the associated transfer of power in the HR and Exec realms.
> Productivity kept on climbing and wages stagnated post ~1980
The growth of government sopped up the difference. Nothing the government does comes for free, and then there's all the additional costs of complying with regulations and doing all the paperwork.
Please stop being the highlight of zero sum thinking.
Let's make up a hypothetical example. The government says you have to install a safety rail and the amortized cost is $1 a year.
You: OMG, this is going to cost $100 over the next century, a huge loss, I am destroyed.
Reality: Johnny doesn't fall of the equipment being coming paralyzed (costing you an immediate $200 in lawsuit and payout fees) and is able to produce economic product over the next few decades bringing in $400 to the economy. Net win for everyone.
That's where the money comes from. Or would you rather be like Russia where you have a giant potential economy that outputs less than Italy and doesn't give a damned about corruption and has terrible quality of living standards/longevity?
They beat out Seattle, that spent $250,000 on a portable toilet a few years ago.
On my own street, the city water outfit installed a fire hydrant. It cost $10,000, including architectural drawings of the installation. When the crew came out to install the hydrant (the main water line runs under my property) I asked them if they'd seen the drawings. They said "what drawings?" They'd never seen nor talked to the engineer, nor had any idea there ever was one. I asked them what the hydrant cost. They said $2,000. They had a machine on the back of the truck that was able to dig the hole, drill the main, and clamp on the new hydrant in 15 minutes.
This was 20 some years ago, back when $10,000 was real money.
The IRS now requires any business that sends out payments to an individual of more than $600 per year now has to file 1099s. The threshold used to be $20,000. A lot of ebay-ers are in for a big surprise. Do you have receipts for what you paid for items you sold on ebay?
Anecdotes about corruption and mismanagement do not address the underlying point that government spending is not zero-sum.
That hydrant was probably too expensive (maybe; insufficient data to say for sure). The damage if a fire breaks out and no municipal fire system is available in a modern city is catastrophic.
You can believe the government is efficient if you like. The fact remains that there's been massive growth in government, and that is going to be paid for out of the economy.
Maybe I've just spent too many years in government contracting, but when I hear that a government program is growing, I hear economic stimulus, not pulling something out of the economy.
China's GDP growth consistently out-paces the US. Canada continues to do well. Germany has consistently positive GDP growth with a few exceptions related to international downturns. And, of course, if you're talking about countries that use economic stimulus, you'll have to include the United States, which has the largest GDP in the world. I think your claim requires a tighter definition of "economy" and "do poorly" to hold merit.
Everybody is doing more poorly than growth estimates, but (a) COVID just happened and (b) everyone always does worse than growth estimates; growth estimates are the rewarded metric and therefore incentives are high to over-estimate it in extrapolation as another form of incentive (i.e. aim higher than you want to hit).
Regardless of personal beliefs, there's the other issues here. First, what does "massive growth in government" even mean? Do you mean in government meddling in people's personal lives, like restricting bodily autonomy for women or banning books? Yes, I agree. Do you mean in government spending? Sure, agreed, the numbers agree. But you seems to be referring to some other kinda vaguely defined concept of like... government bureaucratic-ness? I'm not really sure what you mean and how to measure what you mean.
The second issue is your overall thesis seems to be "the government is inefficient," which is fine to say and to criticize, it certainly is inefficient by many measures, but I feel like you're hinting at some kind of alternative that I can't possibly guess at. Usually these discussions take two routes: the capitalist one, wherein you argue that private industry is more efficient, which even if we accept that efficiency is the only valid measure of how we should choose to do things (amazon builds road faster and cheaper than government: then puts a toll on it so only the rich are allowed to use it. this is bad), is probably not true[0] or possibly the opposite of the truth. Maybe you're more anarchist in your leanings, in which case you're arguing for more distributed and local management of these kinds of services? That could be a really interesting conversation, is that what you're suggesting?
Caltech basically ran on government money so you can thank them for your entire undergraduate education (yes I know you paid tuition but it was no doubt minimal)
yes, government spending increases, always. I'd need to be convinced this is inherently bad lol
2. the amount of interference in the workings of the marketplace, usually called "unfunded mandates" where they put burdens on businesses
What about subsidies, when businesses only exist because of government intervention at all? What about Harley Davidson? The banking sector?
> A much more limited government.
How limited? Is it allowed to prevent monopoly? You seem to know enough about the subject to know that making the state too limited will merely lead to the establishment of state power by monopolistic corporations instead, from plenty of historical examples.
The guy installing the meter was told where to install it, they are not the architect that make sure it actually works if they install top many so it's not a surprise.
It's no different than me 20 years ago installing a server for a client. I would go out slap it in and turn it on. I did not architect the applications on it, nor configure the firewall rules on the router for it to work.
News articles are written about exceptional things, not the mundane.
I saw the drawings. As an engineer, I can assert they were completely custom made and completely unnecessary. You don't need architectural drawings to determine if the flow is sufficient.
Besides, everyone knew the flow was sufficient because it would be the only hydrant upstream of a flow reducer in the main line. I.e. there was plenty of pressure in the line.
The drawings were completely superfluous to a bog-standard install.
> News articles are written about exceptional things
That's true. The hydrant wasn't in the news. Want another one that wasn't exceptional enough to make the news? A nearby one mile stretch of road has been undergoing repaving for THREE YEARS now.
BTW, did you read the article about SF? It blames the permitting process which takes forever and $$$$. That affects everything in SF.
The history of that EPI report is useful to know. Early versions of it showed a large gap between rising productivity and stagnating employee compensation.
Some critics then pointed out problems with the analysis [1]. The report performed an apples-to-oranges comparison of productivity of (A) all non-farm workers adjusted over time with a (B) GDP deflator-based inflation index compared with the compensation of (A) a limited subset of employees adjusted over time with a (B) CPI-based inflation index. A more useful comparison would use the same inflation index for both data sets and would exclude from the productivity measure the workers that are also excluded from the compensation measure. When this is done, the growth in productivity and pay rise and nearly in lockstep, thus effectively refuting the majority of the point that the original report was trying to make.
Since then, the EPI report has been updated to be more nuanced, which can be especially seen when one expands the 'click here for more...' sections. The new conclusion from the report is that productivity and compensation increases have been increasing primarily for a subset of workers while a broad subset of workers have not seen large productivity and compensation growth. This is true (as far as I can tell), but it's also a different story with different policy implications than the original story which implied diverging productivity and pay within the same set of workers.
Perhaps people have had to expend more energy just keeping their personal life together in the last few years. People with children have had to deal with the constant school closings, childcare facility closings, etc. and that has taken its toll. They may have family members who got Covid or had treatment for other ailments delayed by the pandemic's rush to treat Covid patients. They could've experienced a huge shift in the switch to remote working in 2020, and are now expected to make another huge shift back to in-office working.
This doesn't even account for the incredible decline in civility from customers if you work a customer-facing job. The slightest inconvenience or mistake can end up in a tantrum by an American adult that only sometimes gets captured on video. And in the meantime, a bunch of people walk around opining that "Nobody wants to work anymore" as if they deserve to be waited on hand and foot regardless of circumstance.
During Covid, people were hiding in their homes, quarantined, with nothing to do but work.
This year, companies expect workers to return to office, despite little change in conditions, except now we have to deal with all of the above issues you've just mentioned, AND the fact that employees have now proven they can work remotely perfectly well.
It should neither be surprising that in a system where healthcare is tied to employment, that productivity jumped while people were locking themselves in their houses from a plague, or that productivity dropped afterwards, or that it might drop given the complete callousness of our current system.
All of what you've both said, plus the number of people who thought or still think COVID-19 is "no big deal" who now have a pulmonary deficiency and long-term mental fog.
In support of this—part of it!—here’s one paper of many: “The Neurobiology of Long COVID” by M. Monje, neurobiologist at Stanford, and A. Iwasaki, immunologist at Yale.
Prevalence of "Long COVID" is hard to measure at this point, but based on symptom reporting, about 15% of people who test positive for COVID have some symptoms more than 2 months later.[1] More data is available for people who have had heart and brain MRI scans, which show inflammation. It may be possible to diagnose this with a special eye exam that detects inflammation in the eye's blood vessels. The tests are still very experimental, but there are objective measures of damage.
In support of this, I want to mention that there are known and measurable biomarkers that connect reported symptoms to undeniable physical symptoms.
Low cortisol is very common. That’s just one example. With low cortisol it’s hard to feel good or function 100%.
One paper of many that show this kind of relationship (a preprint): “Distinguishing features of Long COVID identified through immune profiling” — https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.08.09.22278592
It’s also important to note that there was a study that seemed to show that Long COVID was just anxiety or in people’s imagination. Because people who said they had Long COVID didn’t have SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. The thing is that not everybody seroconverts. Not everybody actually produces antibodies after infection; We simply can’t exclude Long COVID diagnoses based on looking at those particular antibodies. So that study can’t show what it has been said to show. (I can provide sources for this but am out of time. It’s on my honor.)
The best explanation I've seen thus far, assuming there aren't other complicating factors (which there often are) is that the immune system stays hyperactive in some people after infection. This causes excess production of IL-6 and IL-10, which in turn causes something called the kynurenine shunt. That in turn results in lowered central serotonin rates in the brain and heightened glutamate. This off balance results in lowered dopamine as the production of serotonin and dopamine are comingled. Dopamine usually breaks down to your typical epinephrine and norepinephrine levels. But since dopamine is at a lowered state, you get less epinephrine and norepinephrine. I'm guessing, but do not know the pathway, that lowered epinephrine and norepinephrine explain the lowered cortisol.
Either way, the treatment should be the same. Take a corticosteroid to lower the IL6 & 10 levels, ensure the patient is getting proper sleep and nutrients, and not doing anything to exacerbate lowered serotonin/dopamine levels, and cross your fingers.
I've started to hear of companies that are testing for elevated cytokines as a proof of long covid, and my family member's hospital has started educating their staff on cytokine release syndrome in the rare patient who has a reaction to a vaccine shot, both of which, for me, imply the industry might be moving in this direction for explanation. fingers crossed
"Long COVID" and medical journals.... Even the highest estimates only have it as a very small percentage of symptomatic patients which is already a subset of the general population.
I've been reading it's 10 to 20% of people who test positive have symptoms at least a month, and as much as 5 to 7% three to six months later. The US workforce is around 160 million people. About 60% of the population is estimated to have had SARS-Cov-2 at least once.
60% of 160 million is 96 million. So 5% of that is 4.6 million people or so with at least a solid portion of a year of symptoms.
There's mounting evidence that some of the damage could take years to recover or even be lifelong.
The current word from the Mayo Clinic is about 20% of folks have what they're calling Post-COVID Syndrome between one month and one year after an infection, with at least one symptom likely from the viral infection. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i...
If we look at 20% of 60% of the workforce that's around 19 million people symptomatic for over a month after the initial positive test. Twelve percent, almost one in eight people in the workplace.
My understanding from other articles is its currently 1 in every 3 people currently unemployed cite long covid as the primary reason for inability to return to work, though that data may be a few months old now.
The difficult part of it is: for some people it is literally nothing. We had it now for the fourth time since 2020 even though we’re properly vaccinated and careful as much as life permits.
It’s a bit worse than a cold but much better for than the flu. So, yes, for us life just goes on with COVID. No need to change anything.
That is a problem. It's a dice roll each time a person is infected depending on a huge number of factors including what strain they've been hit with. Reinfections can give worse odds each time. People who got lucky once or twice before might be more careless thinking their luck will continue and end up screwing themselves.
Not necessarily worse, but there is cumulative damage.
In the UK, about 7% of COVID cases that get medical attention are now re-infections. That number increases with time; it was only 4% last February. Immunity from getting COVID is time-limited and not that long. One study said "time between reinfections ranged from 90 to 650 days, with the average being 343 days".
Over a decade, this might gradually debilitate most of the population.
I'm hoping that over the coming decade we get better defenses. Improved vaccines, treatments, and a greater understanding of the virus could prevent a lot of that harm. It hasn't been long enough to see what the long term consequences of infections or even our vaccines and current treatments will be for that matter, but I'll stay up to date on vaccines and continue taking sensible precautions against catching or spreading the virus. It's the best I can do to help my odds given what we know currently.
Paper: “p53/NF-kB Balance in SARS-CoV-2 Infection: From OMICs, Genomics and Pharmacogenomics Insights to Tailored Therapeutic Perspectives (COVIDomics)” — https://doi.org/10.3389/fphar.2022.871583
SARS-CoV-2 directly and indirectly interferes with p53 expression and balance.
On p53: “p53, cellular tumor antigen p53 (UniProt name); p53 proteins are crucial in vertebrates, where they prevent cancer formation. As such, p53 has been described as "the guardian of the genome" because of its role in conserving stability by preventing genome mutation. Hence TP53 is classified as a tumor suppressor gene.” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P53
The literature goes on and on and on. People really are not okay after contracting this virus. I know plenty of people who simply are not recovering after COVID illness. Friends. Close family. Kids.
We are being warned.
And crucially: We can clean this crap out of the air. Nobody has to breathe in SARS-CoV-2. We absolutely must demand that something is done. There’s lots and lots that can be done.
People do study that. There's known to be a significantly increased risk of heart attack and stroke in people who have recovered from influenza, but that risk returns to baseline after about two months. The big risk is in the first 7 days.[1]
All of these seem to say the risks of complications are extremely rare? I mean it's endemic at this point so it's really really shitty if you are one of the unlucky few but what can we even do?
> We can clean this crap out of the air. Nobody has to breathe in SARS-CoV-2.
?? What do you even mean. Maybe if the vaccine prevented spreading the virus we could but until we develop that I don't see how that is possible.
With SARS-CoV-2, complications are more common than death, and it’s still among the top reasons why people die.
Re. cleaning it out of the air: It’s literally airborne and it can literally be cleaned out of the air.
When infected, people emit tiny fluid particles which contain the virus. These are so small that they don’t fall to the ground. Filter materials like in HEPA filters and respirator masks strip these particles out of the air. Very effectively. (Surgical masks don’t work. Same kind of material, gaps at the sides. It doesn’t work.)
We can literally clean the air. We do not have to breathe this virus in. That’s just one of the things we can do.
Paper: “The Removal of Airborne Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and Other Microbial Bioaerosols by Air Filtration on Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Surge Units” – https://doi.org/10.1093/cid/ciab933
I everytime sayd it's not a big deal. Got my vaccine as it was ready but don't done anything else to don't get it. Now it's 2022, never had COVID, or maybee I don't noticed it. So, yes, not a big deal for me.
HN aside, most people don't have jobs that you can do more of at home than at the office / factory / lab / school.
Heck, with school it's quite obvious that "teaching hours delivered" sustained during pandemic, but "education learned" dropped by probably half.
antiwork started off good but quickly went downhill.
I abandoned it some time ago because it is now a "pro-union eco-chamber".
I once advocated serious changes to the labour laws are what is needed, and was inundated with "join a union" posts.
It really speaks to just how out-of-touch these people are.
Unions only care about large corporations because they can get a lot of members and union dues. The issue with this logic is that small businesses are often totally out of the unions reach and laws benefit EVERYONE. The other issue they overlook is Union contracts only apply to those in the union and can change greatly from one union to the next.
IIRC most users and moderators or /r/antiwork were opposed to anyone doing interviews on behalf of them. The person who did just unilaterally decided to do it anyway.
I'm not unionized (I cannot because none of them are purely work focused here and I deeply disagree with their other views), but here is an observation from Norway, 20 years ago:
AFAIK, unionized companies in Norway statistically were more profitable than ununionized ones.
This might of course be because it is more tempting to unionize when there is a lot of money to be had, but I remember one extra detail:
In between (friendly) ribbing I also remember the union people here being focused on working efficient so that our bonus would increase :-)
> I once advocated serious changes to the labour laws are what is needed, and was inundated with "join a union" posts.
Strong unions are the way to get changes in labor laws and how to get collective action.
If we could all just magically come together without any organizational structure in order to effect change in the government and laws we would have already gotten it done.
There isn't a way out that doesn't involve organized collective action and something that looks very much like unions. Individualism doesn't work to effect the kinds of changes that are necessary.
People were inundating you telling you that you needed a Union because what you want is a magical pony, and unfortunately you're the one that is out-of-touch (although in another sense you're not at all out-of-touch since most people believe that there simply MUST be some way to effect change without collective action--which continues to fail but nobody will give up on the dream).
I think part of the issue is that it had its reputation destroyed destroyed almost as quickly as it was built. It was fascinating to watch it unfold.
I do not believe for one second that the person selected for this interview was a good representative for the cause ( although I am sure there are some goofballs, who can't seem to present a coherent case even on hostile territory that is Fox News ). I did not follow story that closely, but I believe the person that took the interview got serious blowback from its reddit friends.
The sad thing is a lot of people will form their entire opinion of it based on this one interview. To me it is OWS all over again ( I do not count BLM as that since it had Democrat political machine, and later business machine, backing ).
I think you’re really on the right track with caregiving, and would add the blind push to force people back into offices without any recognition of the costs of those policies (or, often, perceptible benefits). Going into the office is fairly expensive in any case but it especially pushes parents towards needing daycare and aftercare services which were already expensive before the pandemic and became more so after a non-trivial number of providers found other jobs, became too sick to work, died, or decided the health risk wasn’t worth it after seeing that happen to other people. Our local parents group has had stories about people choosing not to go back to professional jobs because the employers insisting on RTO weren’t paying enough to make up for that, especially if they weren’t accommodating when someone’s schedule is disrupted.
You're right about daycare/school closings. Even now, essentially post-covid, if our two-year-old gets COVID, that's a 10-day quarantine from daycare.
That's 10 days where one of the parents has to work from home and be horribly unproductive because they are watching a child at the same time. And you can get COVID repeatedly. It often from the daycare itself, but also from a sibling who is in school. Even with full, boosted vaccinations, they can still catch it. They don't get very sick, but they have to quarantine.
It's unsustainable.
I'm sure that's not the only cause, but it's definitely a factor.
Not only that, but sometimes even the threat of an outbreak can hamper the availability of childcare. Last winter, a few staff members were exposed to a close contact, so they held them out of work as a precaution - but that resulted in one of the rooms having to close for a week.
I assume the parents and staff at my daycare just have a collective unspoken agreement to not test for covid.
The remaining Covid policies are stupidly inconsistent anyway.
RSV is far more dangerous to children, but that is allowed to go unchecked. Hell, you have to pay $250+ just to get tested for it. Rhinovirus/influenza/norovirus/rotavirus/other coronaviruses are all OK, with kids leaking from both nostrils in the classroom.
But one kid or adult gets Covid and things have to close? Covid tests are paid for by government, but testing for all the other viruses costs hundreds of dollars? What a farce.
> Covid tests are paid for by government, but testing for all the other viruses costs hundreds of dollars? What a farce.
Could you imagine if there was some test that showed you all the viruses that are circulating in your system at any given moment? If we applied the same rules as we do for covid to such a test, people would literally never be able to leave their house...
> Covid tests are paid for by government, but testing for all the other viruses costs hundreds of dollars? What a farce.
None of the other viruses have caused a pandemic, and changed the course of human history (except influenza, but that was almost a century ago).
Have people literally forgotten that entire countries' health systems were overwhelmed by this virus? Seems like it would be prudent to keep infected individuals out of our public school systems for a few more years.
Although, the whole hospital volume thing is now wrapped up in pay shortages and rationing of healthcare, so do not really know how much the spread of virus is contributing and how much the lack of resources being put towards healthcare, and specifically pediatric healthcare is contributing.
> Seems like it would be prudent to keep infected individuals out of our public school systems for a few more years.
This is not possible unless you quarantine toddlers and young kids from each other for years, and I am not willing to pay the price of my kids’ development.
Not to mention that parents need to earn incomes to shelter and feed their kids.
Also, I have had 5 Covid vaccine injections, my kids have had 2, but there exists no RSV vaccine. And RSV is specifically bad for kids, causing a fever almost every time. Given the lack of voting power for those affected, I imagine there is not much political will to spend money on expediting R&D for an RSV vaccine. Just like how pediatric healthcare gets reimbursed at 60% to 75% of adult healthcare.
> I am not willing to pay the price of my kids’ development.
I mean, sooner or later the people working in schools are going to be fed up with parents' constant refrain of "The whole world needs to sacrifice their health so I don't have to keep my kids at home for an extra week."
Somewhat similar to the healthcare workers' issues you mention in your comment.
This is exactly why many people intentionally avoid testing themselves or their children. If you don't have a positive test then officially you don't have COVID-19 and can continue your normal life (symptoms permitting). (I'm not claiming that this is a good practice necessarily but it's what most parents do.)
It depends if you are willing to lie about it. I won't lie.
But the huge, unavoidable disruption that comes from a positive test result certainly doesn't encourage frequent at-home testing. I think at this point most daycare parents test when the school tells them to, and don't test otherwise.
sounds like washington state lol. one of the reasons we moved from there.
now at my kids preschool, if a kid gets sick they stay home, if they are better the next day they come back. no PCR tests, no missing 2 weeks if any member of the family was sick, its great
Would you be willing to share the preschool? I would like to avoid sending my kids to a preschool that pretends asymptomatic spread of diseases doesn't exist.
>This doesn't even account for the incredible decline in civility from customers if you work a customer-facing job.
Not sure if you're in a customer facing job, but I've personally noticed that there seem to be noticeably fewer Karens now compared to pre-pandemic levels. (There was a spike during the first lockdown, but that died down within a few months.)
Everyone seems to be used to random disruptions now, and I think all of the campaigns about retail worker abuse have really made customers stop and think.
> In the first half of 2022, productivity — the measure of how much output in goods and services an employee can produce in an hour — plunged by the sharpest rate on record going back to 1947, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
> The productivity plunge is perplexing, because productivity took off to levels not seen in decades when the coronavirus pandemic forced an overnight switch to remote work
It also comes at a time when many employers are shifting back to hybrid schedules and RTO, despite employee claims that remote work allowed flexibility helped them work more efficiently
What everyone is ignoring is that financial speculation leaks into productivity numbers, and we went into a speculative boom during covid and have been in a speculative bust during this recent period.
This article and the chart within it reference the rate of change in productivity, but not the raw productivity number.
Without seeing those numbers, my assumption -- and what seems to be implied here -- is that productivity rose in early 2020 with remote work, and it is now dropping to pre-pandemic levels.
I'm of the opinion that WFH has been a net negative to productivity. Measuring productivity was much easier for managers to do when everyone was in the office as employees would find it more difficult to hide attempts at slacking off. Those who are less productive when WFH are less willing to admit it and I believe it's the reason why whenever the topic of WFH comes up, it's drowned by the voices of all those who say it's been absolutely great for them.
I don't think anyone is going to argue about the conveniences this WFH culture has brought. And I'm certain there quite a number of people who can prove how much better their work has been because of this shift. Those who are being far less productive, though, are kinda ruining it for the rest of us and lots of managers know it. I think Satya is on point when he talked about what employers say about productivity and what their managers think is actually happening.
Measuring productivity is hard in and out of the office.
From personal experience, it was incredibly easy to do nothing when working from the office while remote you’re more held to your deliverables. In an office, it’s very common to see people look busy, but are just doing unrelated things.
The only difference is that in an office people mask their lack of productivity by pretending to be busy, whereas remote you don’t have to do that.
Eh. I could offer anecdotes ( as I am sure many would as well ) about office life and how much time is spent pretending to work by engaging in vaunted water cooler discussions that recent anti-WFH corporate propaganda had the balls to brand as spontaneous collaborations. And I am saying this with over 15 years of experience in corporate bullshittery.
I honestly do not count "is he in chair staring at screen" as productivity. I count successfully finished projects as such, which brings to question what those managers are trying to measure if they are clearly failing so badly at this. I said before and I will say it again. Managers in US had an easy ride for the past 7 or so decades. Now they are actually asked to work instead of 'managing by walking' and they can't handle it. They need 'throw away their skill set due to Covid'. See twin trail of tears in my eyes?
Managers have all the tools they need and then some. The sheer amount of corporate monitoring software on corporate lappy is beyond astounding. Our manager does not seem to care, but I am horrified to think what other managers use it for. It is very, very intrusive. In other words, if managers can't measure even with those ridiculous and invasive tools at their disposal, what are they doing exactly?
<<I think Satya is on point when he talked about what employers say about productivity and what their managers think is actually happening.
Satya may be repeating what the managers are saying, but managers are saying that they have to actually work for morale and motivation. The horror.
<<Those who are being far less productive, though, are kinda ruining it for the rest of us and lots of managers know it.
Well, is it not manager's job to motivate and coach the less productive employee?
Why is measuring productivity easier to do in the office? Don’t your coworkers have deliverables? How does being in the office make it easier to tell if those deliverables are complete?
My productivity has decreased simply because of delays and shortages. I can't get things when I need them or sometimes at all. Everything takes so much longer when you can't plan for anything.
I think there's a very obvious reason for the "productivity drop": Return to Office
I remember tons of studies showing that remote work had caused unprecedented increases in productivity so it seems plausible to me that companies ending it caused the productivity drop which caused the minor recession earlier this year (the big one due to the Fed's rate hikes is, I believe, still in the future). The article itself even acknowledges that remote work increased productivity yet ignores the 50 foot tall elephant in the room that is RTO.
And yet my company likes to remind people on a daily basis that it's a privilege to be allowed to work from the offices (because they just refurbished them). Literally their wording. Completely detached from reality
Yeah no kidding. If it were demanded of me to RTO after this time of working remote, they wouldn't get quiet quitting, they'd get active sabotage while I search for a new job. There's no excuse for torturing ICs with RTO for reasons of executive vanity.
Wait, are you saying you would actively sabotage your place of employment because they asked you to work in the office? Did you have the same feeling before WFH was even a thing?
Edit: Also, what does "torturing ICs with RTO for reasons of executive vanity" even mean? Have we come so far that working from an office is now "torture"? If so, the level of privilege is simply astounding...
I am not the parent, but I believe I can answer, because my thoughts on the few days that I do venture into office border on postal. In my defense, I hate people who invented mornings with a passion reserved for people, who hurt puppies for amusement.
When I see phrases like "executive vanity", I immediately picture a manager, who saw the productivity numbers gained and decided that those do no matter ( and some of us did go above and beyond specifically to show that there is a benefit to WFH for companies ) and instead opted for butts in chairs for no other reason than "I want to feel like I still matter". Some executives refers to this as management by walking.
<< Have we come so far that working from an office is now "torture"?
It is kinda like this. We all know WFH is possible. We know it results in good results for the company and yet management opts to RTO. They want me to commute, force me to get up extra early, almost kill people on the way two work if I do drive by car ( because I am sleepy; not because I am postal ) and somehow match the productivity that was happening precisely because we implemented WFH? Yes, by comparison it is torture. I had a glimpse of heaven and it was forcibly taken away from me ( it wasn't taken from me, but please understand that this is the mindset ).
edit: And, if you buy into one specific poem I will not name, hell is everyone but heaven and therefore torture.
Whether you agree with it or not is irrelevant. Put yourself in their shoes. See the world through their eyes.
If not, a good chunk of the people, who managed to keep the companies afloat during covid will bounce ( and some did ), because those are the people that actually knew what to do when SHTF.
The BLS recently reported that at its peak, only 7% of Americans were working from home, so this demographic is probably too small to have much large scale impact on the productivity numbers. If there is stagnation in the productivity numbers, we should look at what the other 93% of workers are doing.
Damn. Was it really that low? I ran into census data stating the following:
"Between 2019 and 2021, the number of people primarily working from home tripled from 5.7% (roughly 9 million people) to 17.9% (27.6 million people), according to new 2021 American Community Survey (ACS) 1-year estimates released today by
the U.S. Census Bureau."
I Initially thought maybe the issue is average reported over years, but that does not seem to match either so I went to BLS[2] and the 7% number is there, but it is for for April 2022 and not its peak.
I agree it is almost certainly related. In that a lot of the reporting on rise of productivity that came at the beginning was just as explainable by noise as the current drop is.
That is, I can't rule this out. But I would also not bet against reversion to the mean. Such that the actual waterline on productivity is probably not known, just yet.
It's because RTO hasn't actually happened yet. Most companies either keep WFH or go with a hybrid solution. My theory is that the productivity boost wore off as soon as WFH became the new normal, and went negative due to obvious reasons (easier to slack off). Classic honeymoon phenomenon where everyone was ecstatic to work from home initially but got used to it and now take it for granted.
This! All of the companies kept shortening their dopamine cycle to compete with each other and now people can’t focus in real life for more than 5-10 seconds before they are mentally searching for the scroll button to find a new interaction.
+1 I find watching TikTok or YouTube Shorts to be damaging to my concentration compared to what I consider (for myself) to be healthy activities like reading a book, watching or listening to an interesting interview or educational like philosophy, etc.
I try to fight back by only having TikTok installed on a Chromebook that I don’t often use and for YouTube Shorts, I count the number I have watched.
On my cellphone, if I want to waste time, I prefer a quick game of Chess.
I strongly recommend the https://freedom.to service as well as their podcasts.
It's not just the phones themselves, it's the modern social media apps (TikTok etc.). But I agree it seems to be twisting things up.
I think a closely related issue is how everyone, everywhere, all the time seems to be arguing about political ideologies, or making every issue about red vs. blue or liberal vs. conservative or racist vs. antiracist or whatever other way people want to split others up and then talk about it all day.
I get that it's an election year in the US and people have done this for a long time, but I swear it feels like it is reaching an absolute fever pitch these past years that is different than before.
Because it seems so all-consuming, I think it distracts people from work even more than in the past.
"hits of dopamine" is not really how it works. Drugs like methamphetamine or cocaine directly give you "hits" of dopamine. Perceiving a stimuli through your senses does not directly manipulate the dopaminergic neuronal populations. It's just like any other stimuli where, if the stimulus is actually intrinsically rewarding, eventually the dopaminergic populations in your brain begin to associate the stimuli with potential for reward. This leads to an increased perception of the salience of that particular set of stimuli.
This is very different from cocaine which can cause humans to perceive stimuli as more important and potentially more rewarding even without any rewarding component to the stimuli at all.
Using a computer is not a drug. Stimuli on a screen are no different from stimuli from looking at something else. Using a smart phone does not give you "hits" of dopamine. Stop conflating normal environmental stimuli with drugs that act directly in the brain. It is dangerous because the way governments deal with drugs, and the very real addictions possible, is violence. Bringing violence into this non-violent non-coercive context is immoral.
I agree with your ultimate conclusion ("Using a computer is not a drug"), and that this is an important consideration, but to play with the forest-trees thing here, the stimulus I think most people perceive and/or conditioned to is the alert tone and/or vibration, which I believe has been argued to (not in their words) have some inherent salience, once the user is conditioned by carrying a phone around for a while, at least.
I believe this is one of the avenues argued for "Tech Addictive"/"Screens Bad" - that the intrinsic value of bzzzzzt could, at least hypothetically, be as high as, say, nudes or an "omw" text, or even your dealer texting he's 5min away; and that this inflated value is in turn projected, however briefly, onto every once-in-a-lifetime sale and useless 3am app notification about an icon set update or something.
There's also obviously the much-written-about addictive UI/UX features employed in various places. I vaguely recall one or two unfortunate email chains, maybe, but am assuming most product teams didn't go into meetings with nefarious intentions of getting their users psychologically addicted.
Nevertheless, addictions can be triggered by adjacent things, and however little dopamine "all the little red little circles all over the place" release in my grandmother's brain is probably very different from a chainsmoking coke user taking a swig from his bottle as he picks up his phone to see:
- 32 New Facebook notifications!
- Your dispensary order is ready for pickup!
- sexybabe_notabot69 liked your profile!
- Your bank account is overdrawn!
- 18 new Twitter notifications!
- ALL NEW SLOT MACHINES! NOW WITH DIFFERENT KINDS OF FRUIT AND SHAPES!
- You're never gonna learn Spanish if you keep doing drugs, Carl!
- DON'T MISS OUT! JIMMY BUFFET LIVE AT THE CASINO THIS WEEKEND!
- Your order has shipped!
- YOU'RE GONNA LOSE YOUR VIP STATUS IF YOU DON'T COME BACK HERE AND GAMBLE
- Re: Hey
- THIS WEEKEND ONLY!!!! ANNUAL ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME SALE!
I think I could probably make the argument that maximizing for, say, MAUs/DAUs, is essentially an addictive cycle - a la "valueless reward" - in the business process, probably citing lots of business types who have written lots about how optimizing for the wrong metrics will leave your company broke and homeless too.
So, I guess I'm saying "Using a computer is not a drug", particularly as you used it, is nearly indisputably true, but somewhat misses the conversation being had (however dumb), and that it's worth looking at all of the links in the causal chain and examining how, for example, alarm fatigue and <sleep stuff> compare and contrast (and occur comorbidly with) actual addictive and/or depressive syndromes - for exactly the reasons you listed, like:
"We've found that homeless people using Facebook are xy.z% more likely to relapse on heroin, don't understand statistics, and therefore don't allow our clients to use the internet, except for this one from 2005 that lets them digitally sign the form we need to get reimbursed for the bed."
If you want to argue this then at least use the correct description of the proximal cause, "hits of glutamate in the shell of the nucleus accumbens and ventral tegmental area". It doesn't roll off the tongue and focusing on the neurochemistry ignores the context. So maybe it's better to just say it simply, "If you enjoy doing an enjoyable thing and you do it a lot you'll anticipate liking it more than reality provides on average."
Going to speak for my organization only, but I know exactly why we have become less productive. And it isn't even a bad thing. It's security. We played loose and fast and took risks. We got lucky (as far as I know) and it never bit us, but it certainly bit adjacent organizations and mandates started coming down from higher up to no longer play fast and loose and to prioritize security.
There is inherently a tradeoff here. Don't trust and verify takes longer than trust and don't verify.
* My buddies in trade-based fields say they are working harder than ever, as their backlog has only increased in size
* Less scrutiny when working from home, more fooling around, less work
* Feeling that "grass is greener" elsewhere, therefore no longer being committed
* Polling has shown that their ideal job for Gen-Z is being a CEO of a company, but few seem motivated to start their own business as those stats have been down. Clearly there's a gap in motivation or understanding
Everything else about starting a business is far, far easier than ever. Almost every state in the US has streamlined the business formation process, made it cheaper and faster, etc.
> It is trivial to go to healthcare.gov and buy the same health insurance an employer subsidizes for employees.
This is so shockingly false in most states that I don't understand how you feel you have enough personal experience to state this so confidently.
Neither California nor Texas have any PPO-style plans available on healthcare.gov. For all the public / self-employed plans, "Out-of-network" means "Pay for it yourself, this is not covered at all." That's a huge barrier to care when you need an urgent care and it's not clear which doctor at which urgent care might be covered.
Additionally the rates aren't just different due to subsidy, but due to quality of the participant pool. Many large employers are self-insured / self-funded, and the insurance company just administrates the fund, reimbursements, etc. However, the unsubsidized rates (made known to us via COBRA) are still much, much lower than the healthcare.gov rates because the participants are generally healthy, wealthy, and young.
When you buy healthcare.gov you get the shitty rates. This isn't just a difference of degree ... having a $100 deductible vs. a $6,000 deductible, or a $1,000 OOP max vs. a $22,000 OOP max literally makes the difference whether I can get my gastrointestinal cancer kept in check every year or not. I can afford the COBRA premiums for that $1,000 OOP max, but I absolutely cannot afford the healthcare.gov plan with >$15,000 in premiums on top of the $22,000 OOP max that I'm guaranteed to hit every. single. year. to get the care I need.
Anyone who is pro-business, pro-entrepreneur, should generally be for good public healthcare. This would relieve businesses of a LOT of administrative burden and overhead to let them focus on their core value proposition. It would also facilitate a lot of good startups by freeing people to go build something great. A lot of potential capital growth, innovation, and disruption is being wasted because the people who can do this are stuck in place.
This is not my experience in NJ and WA. Both had PPO plans with wide networks (BCBS at least) available, and I have never had to worry about out of network providers.
Everyone can find out the cost of their health insurance including employer subsidized in box 12 code DD of W-2. Mine have been very close to the healthcare.gov prices, which NJ conveniently lists here:
https://www.state.nj.us/dobi/division_insurance/ihcseh/ihcra...
Also, the individual maximum out of pocket maximum is much less than $22k:
>Anyone who is pro-business, pro-entrepreneur, should generally be for good public healthcare. This would relieve businesses of a LOT of administrative burden and overhead to let them focus on their core value proposition.
The current situation where businesses get to silo wealthy, young, white collar workers into healthier pools of insureds, and the ability to purchase insurance with pre tax money rather than post tax for individuals whose employer does not subsidize is all beneficial to large employers. Which is how they like it.
If the US is going to stick with insurance system, then at least everyone should be dumped on healthcare.gov and employers completely removed from the equation.
The working environment changed. Bit by bit I moved from an environment with gentleman's agreements and so on towards something in which everything was codified, safetyism became rampant, etc.
In the UK over the past few years I went from going into a nice office in a number of beautiful old buildings, getting my stuff done with cameraderie, having lunch together and playing board games, having a laugh in the board room, perhaps a pub visit after work - to sitting alone at home for 8 hours staring at a screen.
So I quit. My productivity - gone. And I fear it's never coming back unless that environment comes back; because I can't effectively function at a "job" with zero human interaction for an entire day, I've had to replace traditional work with other activities.
But is it just me? My friends in retail and other low skill jobs - half the workforce seems to have disappeared so they're all being asked to do far more than is realistically possible. My friends who are in education - the entire job changed, no more giggling and laughing children, you were playing a video game with half the class absent. Perhaps they're back now - but they're dysfunctional because their development was neglected for years. My friends who are in law - the entire job changed, no more travel, no dressing up, sit at home with a screen. My friends who are in medicine - christ, let's not even go there, eh?
I can't speak for those people. But I know that I need a reset, because this "new world" is one I'm just not built for.
No. I go into the office every day because I feel the same. I need to get out of the house and see people. (It is OK if you, reader, do not feel this way! People are different!) There's a handful of other folks who come in every day. I'm starting up a project this week to revive our office culture a bit, to try to spring back from the COVID devastation.
I think a lot of us work-from-home preferrers also like (good) offices better than WFH, just not to the tune of hundreds of dollars and tens of hours lost per month.
Bus pass here costs $90/mo and I get to spend ~80 minutes per day reading books. My office is across the street from the library, it's pretty great :) It's no accident my house is next to a bus line, that was a major factor when we were buying.
> towards something in which everything was codified, safetyism became rampant
Those "gentleman's agreements" were not that great if you happened to be a woman, gay or any other minority. The upsides to HR, employment regulation and so on has been making the office a far better place to work for a lot of people.
While I agree that there are rampant problems in a lot of sectors, from low skilled to medical, there have been some wins. My team went fully remote for 2 years and now most people still work 3 days a week from home. We were able to build up a large and talented team during the lockdowns with most of my co-workers and those I manage 3 timezones away. We adopted more flexible working hours and we've never been happier. My manager can take time in the morning to get his kids to creche and I can take a longer lunch to check in on elderly relatives. I no longer spend 2 hours a day stuck in traffic. Our productivity has skyrocketed. We may be privileged tech workers, but the change in work styles has definitely boosted our company as a whole.
I feel like this is a very real concern? In general I'm in favor of playing fast and loose with rules, and don't put a lot of stock into codifying anything because I feel like it's overall a huge negative when you're trying to get things done.
That all being said this particular arena is one that's so fraught with tiny little edges that all stack up to benefit certain classes of people unequally it unfortunately feels necessary to be explicit and precise. Ultimately this power is a zero sum game, and for and a more equal world means we must take power from some people and give it to others. That's almost never a thing that happens voluntarily, even if the will is there. It's very easy to argue for a status quo that benefits you, especially if the advantages you gain are easy to lie to yourself about.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
― Upton Sinclair
Because one can break gentlemen agreement against people with lower social status. Also, because low key bullying or lying about or whatever of people with lower social status is acceptable for gentlemen.
Again, you say that like it's a fact. Gentlemens agreements can be broken with everyone. Low key bullying or lying about is not acceptable for anyone for gentlemen. You seem to have a misunderstanding what "gentlemen agreement" means. It's not limited to upper class men, or men at all. Everyone can have gentlemens agreements with anyone, it means "two or more people who implicitly agree on a thing".
I totally agree. Where I work, in-person work became optional. Strangely, everyone 35 or younger decided to work from home (most of them don't have kids, which would be the one decent excuse), but the older people mostly come in. At 34, I'm sort of in-between, but enjoyed bantering with people my age or younger.
So I get the worst of both worlds: my boss can still come in my office at any random time and bug me about whatever, but not the social life or the ability to bounce ideas off each other when designing a new system. All-online communication simply does not work for creative or complex tasks.
The youngsters get practically nothing done -- I worked with them for several years before the pandemic, so I know for a fact that their productivity specifically went down 90% -- and guess who gets to pick up the slack? It turns out that even relatively motivated PhD students actually need in-person accountability and direction, or they just spin their wheels at best, or goof off at worst. No matter what excuses they make, it's not good for them in the long run, since it will be reflected in their CV. I'm not against fun, even during work hours, but you have to get the job done.
It's a medical research institution with a small clinic, so there are, as you suggest, additional issues there. I think science, in particular, requires in-depth, in-person conversations and that is where most of the really good ideas come from.
This has been my experience as well at 32. The commercial real estate firm I work at has a 4 days in the office policy, so we have a fairly robust social atmosphere. You can't design a building on a webinar, you need to sit together in a conference room, roll the blueprints out on the table and point to things, sketch changes, review pro formas.. it can't be replaced digitally.
The young people we're getting are like they're from another planet. They think it's' fine to come in late and leave early every day, they only do the bare minimum of work assigned and show zero engagement to help the firm beyond the scope of their assigned tasks. They're all coming from colleges that were remote or jobs that were work from home. How can you learn as a young professional in a work from home setting? You need to sit in on meetings, phone calls and discussions, you need to absorb the whole office around you, not just sitting alone at your computer.
I agree, and adding to this another thing I find now is it's very very hard to spot young talent now if they're fully remote. In a team of 100+ people how can I remember who's performing well, who's good at certain tasks etc when all you are to me is a muted microphone and an avatar with no camera showing. Working in an office with others post COVID isn't about what we're asking you to do, it's about what you bring to the table and offer others. Communication problems among the younger workers (I mean lets say under 25 who've hardly worked in an office before because of covid) are a real problem now. Some don't know how to act, how to behave, how to muck in and be part of a professional workforce with people who have 10, 20, 30 years more experience than them.
> You can't design a building on a webinar, you need to sit together in a conference room, roll the blueprints out on the table and point to things, sketch changes, review pro formas.. it can't be replaced digitally.
just curious, why do you think that is? I spent several years working on project sharing and data visualization features for an architectural CAD program. you could show/hide/recolor all your objects on the fly to emphasize key details, sketch on top of viewports, play around with a clip cube in 3D (personally fixed a lot of bugs with that one...), and sync all your changes back to the main project file to share with colleagues. some of these features were a bit rough around the edges, admittedly, but I always got the impression they were pretty popular with our customers. I'm a little stunned to hear that you and your colleagues just want to print out a couple viewports and look at them on a piece of paper.
>It turns out that even relatively motivated PhD students actually need in-person accountability and direction, or they just spin their wheels at best, or goof off at worst.
You don’t have the data to shows that in-person is necessary. And there are plenty of remote-only companies that make it work. It sounds like you’ve decided that there can only be one possible solution and then given up. That kind of thinking might explain a whole lot about the situation.
Exact same boat dude. I miss the before-fore times a lot and still cannot believe how we got to this position.
Still trying to figure out whats next for me. This WFH shit is gonna stick around in our industry for a while... and it just isn't compatible with how I function. I have no clue what to do next.
I don't consider myself particularly outgoing, but I'm glad to be back in the office 4 days a week. I really enjoy collaborating in person over a laptop or whiteboard, and shooting the breeze with my colleagues.
That said, I don't have an overly long commute, so I totally get it for those that are able to be more productive due to not spending hours in the car every day.
I notice that when I'm working from home, I'm much more likely to goof off and be less focused. Plus my wife being there is always distracting me with one thing or another. I'm pretty sure I'm quite a bit less productive working from home.
I've been working from home since about 2017. I kind of echo this. In the beginning it was nice, I had a HUGE productivity boost. After a while I became disconnected from everything. The other day I realized the only adult I talk to reguarly in person is my wife. Somtimes on weekends I talk to a store clerk. Zoom meetings don't fill that missing spot, it's just work, and I have very little personal connection with any of my coworkers... Days and weeks and months seem to merge.
I'm an introverted person, I like solitude. But I guess all things in balance, it would be nice to talk to another adult once in a while about something that's not work.
I got really into Crypto, because Crypto seems to have a heavy focus on community. It was fun to fly to NY and talk to others in the community. But then I flew home, and the spot was missing again.
I love that this comment defines productivity as lunches, jokes, playing board games, and going to the pub. Though, I agree all those things are more fun than sitting at a computer.
I feel like what we're hearing about excess mortality etc. is also related. The pandemic has been exhausting for so many people, and the multiple sources of uncertainty that have popped up in its wake have made things even worse.
Without understanding precisely what is being measured, it is useless to try to understand why the metric is moving in whatever direction it is moving. This is hand-wringing and trying to blame the workforce for a collapsing bubble.
It's difficult to be productive when you're waiting on a shipment of parts, for one thing. We've been working for decades to make industries work with more advanced logistics and less stock on hand. Now there are supply chain issues, and you can't assemble and sell something if you don't have the parts whether it's a car, a computer, or a rose hip half skim gigante honey latte.
Real wages are up a bit, but revenues are way up despite the supply chain issues. People are being forced back into offices who don't need to be there. Maybe morale is low. I know of concrete instances of low morale, and I'm sure there are others.
People's life changing because of RTO requires attention.
People are often looking to move or to change jobs recently, which requires attention.
Millions of people have been ill with a respiratory/vascular virus which sometimes causes long term damage. More than a million in the US have died from it. Survivors often have pulmonary issues and long-term mental fog which may be permanent or take years to recover. They have less energy and stamina. It's harder for many of them to concentrate. Some of those who died were in the workforce, and whatever knowledge they had about their job died with them. Other deaths were people's family and friends. Funerals, cleaning out houses, donating their belongings, and the grief itself aren't exactly good for worker productivity but they are things humans need to do.
Lots of micromanagers exist. For people who haven't returned to office with no open floor plan to walk around, many of them use a messaging app like Slack to micromanage. Water cooler conversation is in Slack channels. Meetings are in Slack, Teams, or Zoom or something else, and everyone's supposed to be engaged rather than working on their laptop until it's their turn to speak. There are often more officially designated meetings because people can't drop by one another's offices. Lots of work is concentration-based work, or "flow" work. Constant interruptions are bad for anyway, but when it takes 20 or 30 minutes to get all the context in your head to solve a problem and a three-minute interruption to lose all of that, more interruptions can be catastrophic for productivity.
Some types of business have minimum staffing requirements. You can cut staff and try to "right size", but you need enough staff to keep the place open if that's your goal. If orders are down enough, your staff will sometimes have less to do. If because of the shortages mentioned before your ability to fill orders is down, the same thing applies. You have a choice of eating some less profitable quarters until the supply chain levels out or just closing shop. You can't lay off 100% of your trained staff and count on rehiring them later.
They ask just about everyone you can think of in this article about what's up with the US worker. They even ask Larry Summers, even though the only thing Larry Summers has to teach us is how to fail upwards consistently. Of course, they don't think to ask a, you know, US worker about what's up with them.
This is what happens when you measure GDP using services. The tail wags the dog with demand Being the tail. I suspect you see different results if you looked at physical Goods.
'Productive' is such manipulation is this usage. In the modern economy, products shipped per employee often has little relation to how hard an employee works. Does not this metric speak poorly upon leadership's decision-making, the increase of onerous busywork and surveillance, and a dislocated world economy?
If you believe Zuckerberg chasing the Metaverse has misallocated resources, his company has shipped less 'product' per employee. Does that really mean employees have been less 'productive'?
In addition to the other good reasons listed here: Inflation.
Most of us are now paid less in real terms for our efforts than we were 1-2 years ago. If you convert your labor to something invariant, like carrots, you just aren't given as many for a day of hard work. So, to the degree that we are rational beings and have agency on the matter, we scale our output accordingly.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 341 ms ] threadhttps://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
Productivity kept on climbing and wages stagnated post ~1980
Time for the workers to reap some of that benefit.
The trend is towards less immigration and thus lower demand for goods/services and lower supply of labor.
What has actually transpired in the meantime has been record breaking bailouts, corporate handouts, and profits, while workers pay remains in stagnation and housing market inflation goes through the roof (because of slow development, IMO, attributed to NIMBYism, mixed with a nationwide inability to build densely or build public transportation infrastructure).
edit/ And let's not forget, there have also been 2 disastrous, major wars, one of which inarguably never should have occurred.
Yeah. And now it's happening.
Back in 2000 the average baby boomer was 35-55, far from retirement age.
The average baby boomer is now 55-75, and after COVID forced a ton of them out of the labour force, they're choosing not to come back.
See, you can report about a thing that's likely to happen in the future before it actually happens, and in the intervening period, while it may not be happening, that doesn't mean the reporting is wrong.
Or are you also one of those types that thinks the media was overblowing the whole global warming thing because they deigned to report about it before we saw some of the more dramatic and visible effects?
Frankly, I don't know what you're going on about in the rest of your comment. I made no claim that baby boomers aging out of the workforce explains All The Things. I certainly didn't make the claim that it explains trends in the economy up to this point. My point is that it's now a major factor in the economy going forward and we can expect major changes as a consequence.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/11/04/amid-the-pa...
But what if people realized that it was only a delusion, that it can never be that everyone is rich, because then who would do the dirty jobs? There is no social pyramid without a base, this system is litterally designed to have a class of poor people forced to do shitty jobs to survive.
If you take away the hope of a wealthy future, there are no reasons left to slave away your life on a corporate ladder.
At the same time, corporate outsourcing reached epic proportions, with the associated transfer of power in the HR and Exec realms.
The growth of government sopped up the difference. Nothing the government does comes for free, and then there's all the additional costs of complying with regulations and doing all the paperwork.
Let's make up a hypothetical example. The government says you have to install a safety rail and the amortized cost is $1 a year.
You: OMG, this is going to cost $100 over the next century, a huge loss, I am destroyed.
Reality: Johnny doesn't fall of the equipment being coming paralyzed (costing you an immediate $200 in lawsuit and payout fees) and is able to produce economic product over the next few decades bringing in $400 to the economy. Net win for everyone.
That's where the money comes from. Or would you rather be like Russia where you have a giant potential economy that outputs less than Italy and doesn't give a damned about corruption and has terrible quality of living standards/longevity?
https://slate.com/business/2022/10/san-francisco-toilet-mill...
They beat out Seattle, that spent $250,000 on a portable toilet a few years ago.
On my own street, the city water outfit installed a fire hydrant. It cost $10,000, including architectural drawings of the installation. When the crew came out to install the hydrant (the main water line runs under my property) I asked them if they'd seen the drawings. They said "what drawings?" They'd never seen nor talked to the engineer, nor had any idea there ever was one. I asked them what the hydrant cost. They said $2,000. They had a machine on the back of the truck that was able to dig the hole, drill the main, and clamp on the new hydrant in 15 minutes.
This was 20 some years ago, back when $10,000 was real money.
The IRS now requires any business that sends out payments to an individual of more than $600 per year now has to file 1099s. The threshold used to be $20,000. A lot of ebay-ers are in for a big surprise. Do you have receipts for what you paid for items you sold on ebay?
That hydrant was probably too expensive (maybe; insufficient data to say for sure). The damage if a fire breaks out and no municipal fire system is available in a modern city is catastrophic.
I gave real examples, not hypotheticals.
I never said government spending was zero-sum.
> That hydrant was probably too expensive
The bill was $10,000 for a $3,000 job.
> The damage if a fire breaks out and no municipal fire system is available in a modern city is catastrophic.
At $10,000 a pop there'll be a lot fewer hydrants installed, and hence greater risk of catastrophic fire.
China's GDP growth consistently out-paces the US. Canada continues to do well. Germany has consistently positive GDP growth with a few exceptions related to international downturns. And, of course, if you're talking about countries that use economic stimulus, you'll have to include the United States, which has the largest GDP in the world. I think your claim requires a tighter definition of "economy" and "do poorly" to hold merit.
Everybody is doing more poorly than growth estimates, but (a) COVID just happened and (b) everyone always does worse than growth estimates; growth estimates are the rewarded metric and therefore incentives are high to over-estimate it in extrapolation as another form of incentive (i.e. aim higher than you want to hit).
The second issue is your overall thesis seems to be "the government is inefficient," which is fine to say and to criticize, it certainly is inefficient by many measures, but I feel like you're hinting at some kind of alternative that I can't possibly guess at. Usually these discussions take two routes: the capitalist one, wherein you argue that private industry is more efficient, which even if we accept that efficiency is the only valid measure of how we should choose to do things (amazon builds road faster and cheaper than government: then puts a toll on it so only the rich are allowed to use it. this is bad), is probably not true[0] or possibly the opposite of the truth. Maybe you're more anarchist in your leanings, in which case you're arguing for more distributed and local management of these kinds of services? That could be a really interesting conversation, is that what you're suggesting?
[0] https://gsdrc.org/document-library/is-the-private-sector-mor...
1. the amount of money it spends
2. the amount of interference in the workings of the marketplace, usually called "unfunded mandates" where they put burdens on businesses
> I feel like you're hinting at some kind of alternative that I can't possibly guess at.
A much more limited government.
yes, government spending increases, always. I'd need to be convinced this is inherently bad lol
2. the amount of interference in the workings of the marketplace, usually called "unfunded mandates" where they put burdens on businesses
What about subsidies, when businesses only exist because of government intervention at all? What about Harley Davidson? The banking sector?
> A much more limited government.
How limited? Is it allowed to prevent monopoly? You seem to know enough about the subject to know that making the state too limited will merely lead to the establishment of state power by monopolistic corporations instead, from plenty of historical examples.
It's no different than me 20 years ago installing a server for a client. I would go out slap it in and turn it on. I did not architect the applications on it, nor configure the firewall rules on the router for it to work.
News articles are written about exceptional things, not the mundane.
Besides, everyone knew the flow was sufficient because it would be the only hydrant upstream of a flow reducer in the main line. I.e. there was plenty of pressure in the line.
The drawings were completely superfluous to a bog-standard install.
> News articles are written about exceptional things
That's true. The hydrant wasn't in the news. Want another one that wasn't exceptional enough to make the news? A nearby one mile stretch of road has been undergoing repaving for THREE YEARS now.
BTW, did you read the article about SF? It blames the permitting process which takes forever and $$$$. That affects everything in SF.
The history of that EPI report is useful to know. Early versions of it showed a large gap between rising productivity and stagnating employee compensation.
Some critics then pointed out problems with the analysis [1]. The report performed an apples-to-oranges comparison of productivity of (A) all non-farm workers adjusted over time with a (B) GDP deflator-based inflation index compared with the compensation of (A) a limited subset of employees adjusted over time with a (B) CPI-based inflation index. A more useful comparison would use the same inflation index for both data sets and would exclude from the productivity measure the workers that are also excluded from the compensation measure. When this is done, the growth in productivity and pay rise and nearly in lockstep, thus effectively refuting the majority of the point that the original report was trying to make.
Since then, the EPI report has been updated to be more nuanced, which can be especially seen when one expands the 'click here for more...' sections. The new conclusion from the report is that productivity and compensation increases have been increasing primarily for a subset of workers while a broad subset of workers have not seen large productivity and compensation growth. This is true (as far as I can tell), but it's also a different story with different policy implications than the original story which implied diverging productivity and pay within the same set of workers.
[1] https://www.heritage.org/jobs-and-labor/report/workers-compe...
This doesn't even account for the incredible decline in civility from customers if you work a customer-facing job. The slightest inconvenience or mistake can end up in a tantrum by an American adult that only sometimes gets captured on video. And in the meantime, a bunch of people walk around opining that "Nobody wants to work anymore" as if they deserve to be waited on hand and foot regardless of circumstance.
This year, companies expect workers to return to office, despite little change in conditions, except now we have to deal with all of the above issues you've just mentioned, AND the fact that employees have now proven they can work remotely perfectly well.
It should neither be surprising that in a system where healthcare is tied to employment, that productivity jumped while people were locking themselves in their houses from a plague, or that productivity dropped afterwards, or that it might drop given the complete callousness of our current system.
In support of this—part of it!—here’s one paper of many: “The Neurobiology of Long COVID” by M. Monje, neurobiologist at Stanford, and A. Iwasaki, immunologist at Yale.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2022.10.006
People with measurable neurobiological issues will show a measurable productivity drop.
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
Low cortisol is very common. That’s just one example. With low cortisol it’s hard to feel good or function 100%.
One paper of many that show this kind of relationship (a preprint): “Distinguishing features of Long COVID identified through immune profiling” — https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.08.09.22278592
It’s also important to note that there was a study that seemed to show that Long COVID was just anxiety or in people’s imagination. Because people who said they had Long COVID didn’t have SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. The thing is that not everybody seroconverts. Not everybody actually produces antibodies after infection; We simply can’t exclude Long COVID diagnoses based on looking at those particular antibodies. So that study can’t show what it has been said to show. (I can provide sources for this but am out of time. It’s on my honor.)
Either way, the treatment should be the same. Take a corticosteroid to lower the IL6 & 10 levels, ensure the patient is getting proper sleep and nutrients, and not doing anything to exacerbate lowered serotonin/dopamine levels, and cross your fingers.
I've started to hear of companies that are testing for elevated cytokines as a proof of long covid, and my family member's hospital has started educating their staff on cytokine release syndrome in the rare patient who has a reaction to a vaccine shot, both of which, for me, imply the industry might be moving in this direction for explanation. fingers crossed
60% of 160 million is 96 million. So 5% of that is 4.6 million people or so with at least a solid portion of a year of symptoms.
There's mounting evidence that some of the damage could take years to recover or even be lifelong.
The current word from the Mayo Clinic is about 20% of folks have what they're calling Post-COVID Syndrome between one month and one year after an infection, with at least one symptom likely from the viral infection. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i...
If we look at 20% of 60% of the workforce that's around 19 million people symptomatic for over a month after the initial positive test. Twelve percent, almost one in eight people in the workplace.
It’s a bit worse than a cold but much better for than the flu. So, yes, for us life just goes on with COVID. No need to change anything.
https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20220707/each-covid-19-reinf...
Not necessarily worse, but there is cumulative damage.
In the UK, about 7% of COVID cases that get medical attention are now re-infections. That number increases with time; it was only 4% last February. Immunity from getting COVID is time-limited and not that long. One study said "time between reinfections ranged from 90 to 650 days, with the average being 343 days".
Over a decade, this might gradually debilitate most of the population.
Paper: Immunological dysfunction persists for 8 months following initial mild-to-moderate SARS-CoV-2 infection – https://doi.org/10.1038/s41590-021-01113-x
Paper: “Excess risk for acute myocardial infarction mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic” — https://doi.org/10.1002/jmv.28187
Paper: “p53/NF-kB Balance in SARS-CoV-2 Infection: From OMICs, Genomics and Pharmacogenomics Insights to Tailored Therapeutic Perspectives (COVIDomics)” — https://doi.org/10.3389/fphar.2022.871583
SARS-CoV-2 directly and indirectly interferes with p53 expression and balance.
On p53: “p53, cellular tumor antigen p53 (UniProt name); p53 proteins are crucial in vertebrates, where they prevent cancer formation. As such, p53 has been described as "the guardian of the genome" because of its role in conserving stability by preventing genome mutation. Hence TP53 is classified as a tumor suppressor gene.” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P53
The literature goes on and on and on. People really are not okay after contracting this virus. I know plenty of people who simply are not recovering after COVID illness. Friends. Close family. Kids.
We are being warned.
And crucially: We can clean this crap out of the air. Nobody has to breathe in SARS-CoV-2. We absolutely must demand that something is done. There’s lots and lots that can be done.
[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1702090
> We can clean this crap out of the air. Nobody has to breathe in SARS-CoV-2.
?? What do you even mean. Maybe if the vaccine prevented spreading the virus we could but until we develop that I don't see how that is possible.
Re. cleaning it out of the air: It’s literally airborne and it can literally be cleaned out of the air.
When infected, people emit tiny fluid particles which contain the virus. These are so small that they don’t fall to the ground. Filter materials like in HEPA filters and respirator masks strip these particles out of the air. Very effectively. (Surgical masks don’t work. Same kind of material, gaps at the sides. It doesn’t work.)
We can literally clean the air. We do not have to breathe this virus in. That’s just one of the things we can do.
Paper: “Effectiveness of HEPA Filters at Removing Infectious SARS-CoV-2 from the Air” – https://doi.org/10.1128/msphere.00086-22
Paper: “The Removal of Airborne Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and Other Microbial Bioaerosols by Air Filtration on Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Surge Units” – https://doi.org/10.1093/cid/ciab933
“Ten scientific reasons in support of airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2” – https://doi.org/10.1016/s0140-6736(21)00869-2
Why am I saying all of this?
Because I have a moral obligation to do so.
Why do I know this?
I don’t know anything. I’ve just read those scientific papers.
Why did I read them?
Because high-risk pregnancy.
But does it apply outside of high-risk pregnancy?
Yes.
It's shocking how much this can help with other things e.g. asthma or allergies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yUMIFYBMnc
I abandoned it some time ago because it is now a "pro-union eco-chamber".
I once advocated serious changes to the labour laws are what is needed, and was inundated with "join a union" posts.
It really speaks to just how out-of-touch these people are.
Unions only care about large corporations because they can get a lot of members and union dues. The issue with this logic is that small businesses are often totally out of the unions reach and laws benefit EVERYONE. The other issue they overlook is Union contracts only apply to those in the union and can change greatly from one union to the next.
As i said, i just found it shocking that "join a union" was their only response.
Labour laws impact everyone, union contracts don't.
AFAIK, unionized companies in Norway statistically were more profitable than ununionized ones.
This might of course be because it is more tempting to unionize when there is a lot of money to be had, but I remember one extra detail:
In between (friendly) ribbing I also remember the union people here being focused on working efficient so that our bonus would increase :-)
Strong unions are the way to get changes in labor laws and how to get collective action.
If we could all just magically come together without any organizational structure in order to effect change in the government and laws we would have already gotten it done.
There isn't a way out that doesn't involve organized collective action and something that looks very much like unions. Individualism doesn't work to effect the kinds of changes that are necessary.
People were inundating you telling you that you needed a Union because what you want is a magical pony, and unfortunately you're the one that is out-of-touch (although in another sense you're not at all out-of-touch since most people believe that there simply MUST be some way to effect change without collective action--which continues to fail but nobody will give up on the dream).
I do not believe for one second that the person selected for this interview was a good representative for the cause ( although I am sure there are some goofballs, who can't seem to present a coherent case even on hostile territory that is Fox News ). I did not follow story that closely, but I believe the person that took the interview got serious blowback from its reddit friends.
The sad thing is a lot of people will form their entire opinion of it based on this one interview. To me it is OWS all over again ( I do not count BLM as that since it had Democrat political machine, and later business machine, backing ).
That's 10 days where one of the parents has to work from home and be horribly unproductive because they are watching a child at the same time. And you can get COVID repeatedly. It often from the daycare itself, but also from a sibling who is in school. Even with full, boosted vaccinations, they can still catch it. They don't get very sick, but they have to quarantine.
It's unsustainable.
I'm sure that's not the only cause, but it's definitely a factor.
The remaining Covid policies are stupidly inconsistent anyway.
RSV is far more dangerous to children, but that is allowed to go unchecked. Hell, you have to pay $250+ just to get tested for it. Rhinovirus/influenza/norovirus/rotavirus/other coronaviruses are all OK, with kids leaking from both nostrils in the classroom.
But one kid or adult gets Covid and things have to close? Covid tests are paid for by government, but testing for all the other viruses costs hundreds of dollars? What a farce.
Could you imagine if there was some test that showed you all the viruses that are circulating in your system at any given moment? If we applied the same rules as we do for covid to such a test, people would literally never be able to leave their house...
None of the other viruses have caused a pandemic, and changed the course of human history (except influenza, but that was almost a century ago).
Have people literally forgotten that entire countries' health systems were overwhelmed by this virus? Seems like it would be prudent to keep infected individuals out of our public school systems for a few more years.
https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/ydhvbs/how_are_my...
Although, the whole hospital volume thing is now wrapped up in pay shortages and rationing of healthcare, so do not really know how much the spread of virus is contributing and how much the lack of resources being put towards healthcare, and specifically pediatric healthcare is contributing.
> Seems like it would be prudent to keep infected individuals out of our public school systems for a few more years.
This is not possible unless you quarantine toddlers and young kids from each other for years, and I am not willing to pay the price of my kids’ development.
Not to mention that parents need to earn incomes to shelter and feed their kids.
Also, I have had 5 Covid vaccine injections, my kids have had 2, but there exists no RSV vaccine. And RSV is specifically bad for kids, causing a fever almost every time. Given the lack of voting power for those affected, I imagine there is not much political will to spend money on expediting R&D for an RSV vaccine. Just like how pediatric healthcare gets reimbursed at 60% to 75% of adult healthcare.
I mean, sooner or later the people working in schools are going to be fed up with parents' constant refrain of "The whole world needs to sacrifice their health so I don't have to keep my kids at home for an extra week."
Somewhat similar to the healthcare workers' issues you mention in your comment.
But the huge, unavoidable disruption that comes from a positive test result certainly doesn't encourage frequent at-home testing. I think at this point most daycare parents test when the school tells them to, and don't test otherwise.
now at my kids preschool, if a kid gets sick they stay home, if they are better the next day they come back. no PCR tests, no missing 2 weeks if any member of the family was sick, its great
Well, you kids have fun.
sound of me closing the door in my pyjamas with a nice hot coffee in my other hand
Not sure if you're in a customer facing job, but I've personally noticed that there seem to be noticeably fewer Karens now compared to pre-pandemic levels. (There was a spike during the first lockdown, but that died down within a few months.)
Everyone seems to be used to random disruptions now, and I think all of the campaigns about retail worker abuse have really made customers stop and think.
> The productivity plunge is perplexing, because productivity took off to levels not seen in decades when the coronavirus pandemic forced an overnight switch to remote work
It also comes at a time when many employers are shifting back to hybrid schedules and RTO, despite employee claims that remote work allowed flexibility helped them work more efficiently
.
What a mystery.
Without seeing those numbers, my assumption -- and what seems to be implied here -- is that productivity rose in early 2020 with remote work, and it is now dropping to pre-pandemic levels.
I don't think anyone is going to argue about the conveniences this WFH culture has brought. And I'm certain there quite a number of people who can prove how much better their work has been because of this shift. Those who are being far less productive, though, are kinda ruining it for the rest of us and lots of managers know it. I think Satya is on point when he talked about what employers say about productivity and what their managers think is actually happening.
From personal experience, it was incredibly easy to do nothing when working from the office while remote you’re more held to your deliverables. In an office, it’s very common to see people look busy, but are just doing unrelated things.
The only difference is that in an office people mask their lack of productivity by pretending to be busy, whereas remote you don’t have to do that.
I honestly do not count "is he in chair staring at screen" as productivity. I count successfully finished projects as such, which brings to question what those managers are trying to measure if they are clearly failing so badly at this. I said before and I will say it again. Managers in US had an easy ride for the past 7 or so decades. Now they are actually asked to work instead of 'managing by walking' and they can't handle it. They need 'throw away their skill set due to Covid'. See twin trail of tears in my eyes?
Managers have all the tools they need and then some. The sheer amount of corporate monitoring software on corporate lappy is beyond astounding. Our manager does not seem to care, but I am horrified to think what other managers use it for. It is very, very intrusive. In other words, if managers can't measure even with those ridiculous and invasive tools at their disposal, what are they doing exactly?
<<I think Satya is on point when he talked about what employers say about productivity and what their managers think is actually happening.
Satya may be repeating what the managers are saying, but managers are saying that they have to actually work for morale and motivation. The horror.
<<Those who are being far less productive, though, are kinda ruining it for the rest of us and lots of managers know it.
Well, is it not manager's job to motivate and coach the less productive employee?
I remember tons of studies showing that remote work had caused unprecedented increases in productivity so it seems plausible to me that companies ending it caused the productivity drop which caused the minor recession earlier this year (the big one due to the Fed's rate hikes is, I believe, still in the future). The article itself even acknowledges that remote work increased productivity yet ignores the 50 foot tall elephant in the room that is RTO.
Edit: Also, what does "torturing ICs with RTO for reasons of executive vanity" even mean? Have we come so far that working from an office is now "torture"? If so, the level of privilege is simply astounding...
When I see phrases like "executive vanity", I immediately picture a manager, who saw the productivity numbers gained and decided that those do no matter ( and some of us did go above and beyond specifically to show that there is a benefit to WFH for companies ) and instead opted for butts in chairs for no other reason than "I want to feel like I still matter". Some executives refers to this as management by walking.
<< Have we come so far that working from an office is now "torture"?
It is kinda like this. We all know WFH is possible. We know it results in good results for the company and yet management opts to RTO. They want me to commute, force me to get up extra early, almost kill people on the way two work if I do drive by car ( because I am sleepy; not because I am postal ) and somehow match the productivity that was happening precisely because we implemented WFH? Yes, by comparison it is torture. I had a glimpse of heaven and it was forcibly taken away from me ( it wasn't taken from me, but please understand that this is the mindset ).
edit: And, if you buy into one specific poem I will not name, hell is everyone but heaven and therefore torture.
Whether you agree with it or not is irrelevant. Put yourself in their shoes. See the world through their eyes.
If not, a good chunk of the people, who managed to keep the companies afloat during covid will bounce ( and some did ), because those are the people that actually knew what to do when SHTF.
"Between 2019 and 2021, the number of people primarily working from home tripled from 5.7% (roughly 9 million people) to 17.9% (27.6 million people), according to new 2021 American Community Survey (ACS) 1-year estimates released today by the U.S. Census Bureau."
I Initially thought maybe the issue is average reported over years, but that does not seem to match either so I went to BLS[2] and the 7% number is there, but it is for for April 2022 and not its peak.
Chart data suggests double digit average.
Please correct me if I am misreading something.
[1]https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/people-w... [2]https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2022/7-7-percent-of-workers-tel...
That is, I can't rule this out. But I would also not bet against reversion to the mean. Such that the actual waterline on productivity is probably not known, just yet.
I try to fight back by only having TikTok installed on a Chromebook that I don’t often use and for YouTube Shorts, I count the number I have watched.
On my cellphone, if I want to waste time, I prefer a quick game of Chess.
I strongly recommend the https://freedom.to service as well as their podcasts.
I think a closely related issue is how everyone, everywhere, all the time seems to be arguing about political ideologies, or making every issue about red vs. blue or liberal vs. conservative or racist vs. antiracist or whatever other way people want to split others up and then talk about it all day.
I get that it's an election year in the US and people have done this for a long time, but I swear it feels like it is reaching an absolute fever pitch these past years that is different than before.
Because it seems so all-consuming, I think it distracts people from work even more than in the past.
This is very different from cocaine which can cause humans to perceive stimuli as more important and potentially more rewarding even without any rewarding component to the stimuli at all.
Using a computer is not a drug. Stimuli on a screen are no different from stimuli from looking at something else. Using a smart phone does not give you "hits" of dopamine. Stop conflating normal environmental stimuli with drugs that act directly in the brain. It is dangerous because the way governments deal with drugs, and the very real addictions possible, is violence. Bringing violence into this non-violent non-coercive context is immoral.
I believe this is one of the avenues argued for "Tech Addictive"/"Screens Bad" - that the intrinsic value of bzzzzzt could, at least hypothetically, be as high as, say, nudes or an "omw" text, or even your dealer texting he's 5min away; and that this inflated value is in turn projected, however briefly, onto every once-in-a-lifetime sale and useless 3am app notification about an icon set update or something.
There's also obviously the much-written-about addictive UI/UX features employed in various places. I vaguely recall one or two unfortunate email chains, maybe, but am assuming most product teams didn't go into meetings with nefarious intentions of getting their users psychologically addicted.
Nevertheless, addictions can be triggered by adjacent things, and however little dopamine "all the little red little circles all over the place" release in my grandmother's brain is probably very different from a chainsmoking coke user taking a swig from his bottle as he picks up his phone to see: - 32 New Facebook notifications! - Your dispensary order is ready for pickup! - sexybabe_notabot69 liked your profile! - Your bank account is overdrawn! - 18 new Twitter notifications! - ALL NEW SLOT MACHINES! NOW WITH DIFFERENT KINDS OF FRUIT AND SHAPES! - You're never gonna learn Spanish if you keep doing drugs, Carl! - DON'T MISS OUT! JIMMY BUFFET LIVE AT THE CASINO THIS WEEKEND! - Your order has shipped! - YOU'RE GONNA LOSE YOUR VIP STATUS IF YOU DON'T COME BACK HERE AND GAMBLE - Re: Hey - THIS WEEKEND ONLY!!!! ANNUAL ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME SALE!
I think I could probably make the argument that maximizing for, say, MAUs/DAUs, is essentially an addictive cycle - a la "valueless reward" - in the business process, probably citing lots of business types who have written lots about how optimizing for the wrong metrics will leave your company broke and homeless too.
So, I guess I'm saying "Using a computer is not a drug", particularly as you used it, is nearly indisputably true, but somewhat misses the conversation being had (however dumb), and that it's worth looking at all of the links in the causal chain and examining how, for example, alarm fatigue and <sleep stuff> compare and contrast (and occur comorbidly with) actual addictive and/or depressive syndromes - for exactly the reasons you listed, like:
"We've found that homeless people using Facebook are xy.z% more likely to relapse on heroin, don't understand statistics, and therefore don't allow our clients to use the internet, except for this one from 2005 that lets them digitally sign the form we need to get reimbursed for the bed."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33394486
There is inherently a tradeoff here. Don't trust and verify takes longer than trust and don't verify.
* My buddies in trade-based fields say they are working harder than ever, as their backlog has only increased in size
* Less scrutiny when working from home, more fooling around, less work
* Feeling that "grass is greener" elsewhere, therefore no longer being committed
* Polling has shown that their ideal job for Gen-Z is being a CEO of a company, but few seem motivated to start their own business as those stats have been down. Clearly there's a gap in motivation or understanding
Everything else about starting a business is far, far easier than ever. Almost every state in the US has streamlined the business formation process, made it cheaper and faster, etc.
It is trivial to go to healthcare.gov and buy the same health insurance an employer subsidizes for employees.
This is so shockingly false in most states that I don't understand how you feel you have enough personal experience to state this so confidently.
Neither California nor Texas have any PPO-style plans available on healthcare.gov. For all the public / self-employed plans, "Out-of-network" means "Pay for it yourself, this is not covered at all." That's a huge barrier to care when you need an urgent care and it's not clear which doctor at which urgent care might be covered.
Additionally the rates aren't just different due to subsidy, but due to quality of the participant pool. Many large employers are self-insured / self-funded, and the insurance company just administrates the fund, reimbursements, etc. However, the unsubsidized rates (made known to us via COBRA) are still much, much lower than the healthcare.gov rates because the participants are generally healthy, wealthy, and young.
When you buy healthcare.gov you get the shitty rates. This isn't just a difference of degree ... having a $100 deductible vs. a $6,000 deductible, or a $1,000 OOP max vs. a $22,000 OOP max literally makes the difference whether I can get my gastrointestinal cancer kept in check every year or not. I can afford the COBRA premiums for that $1,000 OOP max, but I absolutely cannot afford the healthcare.gov plan with >$15,000 in premiums on top of the $22,000 OOP max that I'm guaranteed to hit every. single. year. to get the care I need.
Anyone who is pro-business, pro-entrepreneur, should generally be for good public healthcare. This would relieve businesses of a LOT of administrative burden and overhead to let them focus on their core value proposition. It would also facilitate a lot of good startups by freeing people to go build something great. A lot of potential capital growth, innovation, and disruption is being wasted because the people who can do this are stuck in place.
Everyone can find out the cost of their health insurance including employer subsidized in box 12 code DD of W-2. Mine have been very close to the healthcare.gov prices, which NJ conveniently lists here: https://www.state.nj.us/dobi/division_insurance/ihcseh/ihcra...
Also, the individual maximum out of pocket maximum is much less than $22k:
https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/out-of-pocket-maximum-li...
>Anyone who is pro-business, pro-entrepreneur, should generally be for good public healthcare. This would relieve businesses of a LOT of administrative burden and overhead to let them focus on their core value proposition.
The current situation where businesses get to silo wealthy, young, white collar workers into healthier pools of insureds, and the ability to purchase insurance with pre tax money rather than post tax for individuals whose employer does not subsidize is all beneficial to large employers. Which is how they like it.
If the US is going to stick with insurance system, then at least everyone should be dumped on healthcare.gov and employers completely removed from the equation.
2. select a plan
3. pay for it
4. congrats, you now have healthcare.
The working environment changed. Bit by bit I moved from an environment with gentleman's agreements and so on towards something in which everything was codified, safetyism became rampant, etc.
In the UK over the past few years I went from going into a nice office in a number of beautiful old buildings, getting my stuff done with cameraderie, having lunch together and playing board games, having a laugh in the board room, perhaps a pub visit after work - to sitting alone at home for 8 hours staring at a screen.
So I quit. My productivity - gone. And I fear it's never coming back unless that environment comes back; because I can't effectively function at a "job" with zero human interaction for an entire day, I've had to replace traditional work with other activities.
But is it just me? My friends in retail and other low skill jobs - half the workforce seems to have disappeared so they're all being asked to do far more than is realistically possible. My friends who are in education - the entire job changed, no more giggling and laughing children, you were playing a video game with half the class absent. Perhaps they're back now - but they're dysfunctional because their development was neglected for years. My friends who are in law - the entire job changed, no more travel, no dressing up, sit at home with a screen. My friends who are in medicine - christ, let's not even go there, eh?
I can't speak for those people. But I know that I need a reset, because this "new world" is one I'm just not built for.
No. I go into the office every day because I feel the same. I need to get out of the house and see people. (It is OK if you, reader, do not feel this way! People are different!) There's a handful of other folks who come in every day. I'm starting up a project this week to revive our office culture a bit, to try to spring back from the COVID devastation.
I appreciate your message. Good luck.
Those "gentleman's agreements" were not that great if you happened to be a woman, gay or any other minority. The upsides to HR, employment regulation and so on has been making the office a far better place to work for a lot of people.
While I agree that there are rampant problems in a lot of sectors, from low skilled to medical, there have been some wins. My team went fully remote for 2 years and now most people still work 3 days a week from home. We were able to build up a large and talented team during the lockdowns with most of my co-workers and those I manage 3 timezones away. We adopted more flexible working hours and we've never been happier. My manager can take time in the morning to get his kids to creche and I can take a longer lunch to check in on elderly relatives. I no longer spend 2 hours a day stuck in traffic. Our productivity has skyrocketed. We may be privileged tech workers, but the change in work styles has definitely boosted our company as a whole.
That all being said this particular arena is one that's so fraught with tiny little edges that all stack up to benefit certain classes of people unequally it unfortunately feels necessary to be explicit and precise. Ultimately this power is a zero sum game, and for and a more equal world means we must take power from some people and give it to others. That's almost never a thing that happens voluntarily, even if the will is there. It's very easy to argue for a status quo that benefits you, especially if the advantages you gain are easy to lie to yourself about.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” ― Upton Sinclair
You just say that like it's a fact, but... why would that be the case?
So I get the worst of both worlds: my boss can still come in my office at any random time and bug me about whatever, but not the social life or the ability to bounce ideas off each other when designing a new system. All-online communication simply does not work for creative or complex tasks.
The youngsters get practically nothing done -- I worked with them for several years before the pandemic, so I know for a fact that their productivity specifically went down 90% -- and guess who gets to pick up the slack? It turns out that even relatively motivated PhD students actually need in-person accountability and direction, or they just spin their wheels at best, or goof off at worst. No matter what excuses they make, it's not good for them in the long run, since it will be reflected in their CV. I'm not against fun, even during work hours, but you have to get the job done.
It's a medical research institution with a small clinic, so there are, as you suggest, additional issues there. I think science, in particular, requires in-depth, in-person conversations and that is where most of the really good ideas come from.
The young people we're getting are like they're from another planet. They think it's' fine to come in late and leave early every day, they only do the bare minimum of work assigned and show zero engagement to help the firm beyond the scope of their assigned tasks. They're all coming from colleges that were remote or jobs that were work from home. How can you learn as a young professional in a work from home setting? You need to sit in on meetings, phone calls and discussions, you need to absorb the whole office around you, not just sitting alone at your computer.
just curious, why do you think that is? I spent several years working on project sharing and data visualization features for an architectural CAD program. you could show/hide/recolor all your objects on the fly to emphasize key details, sketch on top of viewports, play around with a clip cube in 3D (personally fixed a lot of bugs with that one...), and sync all your changes back to the main project file to share with colleagues. some of these features were a bit rough around the edges, admittedly, but I always got the impression they were pretty popular with our customers. I'm a little stunned to hear that you and your colleagues just want to print out a couple viewports and look at them on a piece of paper.
You don’t have the data to shows that in-person is necessary. And there are plenty of remote-only companies that make it work. It sounds like you’ve decided that there can only be one possible solution and then given up. That kind of thinking might explain a whole lot about the situation.
Still trying to figure out whats next for me. This WFH shit is gonna stick around in our industry for a while... and it just isn't compatible with how I function. I have no clue what to do next.
Just wanted you to know that you're not alone.
That said, I don't have an overly long commute, so I totally get it for those that are able to be more productive due to not spending hours in the car every day.
I notice that when I'm working from home, I'm much more likely to goof off and be less focused. Plus my wife being there is always distracting me with one thing or another. I'm pretty sure I'm quite a bit less productive working from home.
More generically: young kids require attention, then we grow up and most adults desire attention but only get a little.
Even very high status individuals often seek attention (Elon & sinks?). I wonder how much of our status economy is about getting attention?
Giving great attention can be quite the aphrodisiac.
I'm an introverted person, I like solitude. But I guess all things in balance, it would be nice to talk to another adult once in a while about something that's not work.
I got really into Crypto, because Crypto seems to have a heavy focus on community. It was fun to fly to NY and talk to others in the community. But then I flew home, and the spot was missing again.
It’s going to take a year or more before people feel like they’ve recovered.
I do hope we find a way to recover.
They admit knowledge worker productivity if ‘tricky’ to measure, yet are somehow sure it has decreased drastically, with no link to evidence.
Real wages are up a bit, but revenues are way up despite the supply chain issues. People are being forced back into offices who don't need to be there. Maybe morale is low. I know of concrete instances of low morale, and I'm sure there are others.
People's life changing because of RTO requires attention.
People are often looking to move or to change jobs recently, which requires attention.
Millions of people have been ill with a respiratory/vascular virus which sometimes causes long term damage. More than a million in the US have died from it. Survivors often have pulmonary issues and long-term mental fog which may be permanent or take years to recover. They have less energy and stamina. It's harder for many of them to concentrate. Some of those who died were in the workforce, and whatever knowledge they had about their job died with them. Other deaths were people's family and friends. Funerals, cleaning out houses, donating their belongings, and the grief itself aren't exactly good for worker productivity but they are things humans need to do.
Lots of micromanagers exist. For people who haven't returned to office with no open floor plan to walk around, many of them use a messaging app like Slack to micromanage. Water cooler conversation is in Slack channels. Meetings are in Slack, Teams, or Zoom or something else, and everyone's supposed to be engaged rather than working on their laptop until it's their turn to speak. There are often more officially designated meetings because people can't drop by one another's offices. Lots of work is concentration-based work, or "flow" work. Constant interruptions are bad for anyway, but when it takes 20 or 30 minutes to get all the context in your head to solve a problem and a three-minute interruption to lose all of that, more interruptions can be catastrophic for productivity.
Some types of business have minimum staffing requirements. You can cut staff and try to "right size", but you need enough staff to keep the place open if that's your goal. If orders are down enough, your staff will sometimes have less to do. If because of the shortages mentioned before your ability to fill orders is down, the same thing applies. You have a choice of eating some less profitable quarters until the supply chain levels out or just closing shop. You can't lay off 100% of your trained staff and count on rehiring them later.
If you believe Zuckerberg chasing the Metaverse has misallocated resources, his company has shipped less 'product' per employee. Does that really mean employees have been less 'productive'?
Most of us are now paid less in real terms for our efforts than we were 1-2 years ago. If you convert your labor to something invariant, like carrots, you just aren't given as many for a day of hard work. So, to the degree that we are rational beings and have agency on the matter, we scale our output accordingly.
Otherwise well, less crap produced and reaching the global market is already something nice to hear I guess.